Smoke
by Kibble
Summary: Hal and Dave take a trip to China. Slash.
1. Chapter 1

Hello, I'm back. All people and events in this story are fictional, and all places are being used for fictional purposes. Any resemblance to real people or events is entirely coincidental. Hal, Dave and Metal Gear belong to Hideo Kojima, I am borrowing them for my own nefarious devices. I'm not making any money off this, but reviews make me all tingly inside. You know me, slash and plot, if you don't like one, I hope the other is enough to satisfy you.

Smoke

Having got the shower to a pleasantly cool temperature, David started unlacing his boots, oblivious to Hal slinking out of their bedroom. The first he knew of the other man's presence was when he burst through the bathroom door. Dave jumped and span around, yanking his M9 from its holster.

Hal just tutted with disappointment. "Aww! I expected some dripping wet muscles, and you're not even naked."

"Dammit, Hal!" Yelled the soldier, lowering his gun and flicking the safety catch on. "Are you trying to get killed, creeping up on me like that?"

"I thought that thing only fired tranquilliser rounds?" He inquired mildly, stepping forward to press himself lightly against his partner's broad chest.

"Yeah, well, it'd still hurt..." Dave faltered, putting his arm around the waist of the slim man as he stretched up to kiss the back of his neck. "Sorry. Tough night." That was all the warning Hal got before he found himself squashed between cold white tiles and his powerful lover, freezing water soaking his clothes and Dave's tongue prising apart his lips.

"Mmph! Wait, I found a really hot lead, and-!" Trapped, Hal slid one hand down the front of Dave's trousers, grabbed the man's throbbing cock and roughly caressed it.

"A lead? What kind of lead?" Dave demanded, peeling Hal's sodden t-shirt away from his skin, lifting it over his head, and pressing his lips to the programmer's skinny, goose-pimpled chest.

Hal unfastened Dave's trousers with his free hand, letting them drop down as he cupped the soldier's balls and squeezed gently, causing a faint, high-pitched gasp. He moved his other hand towards the base of Dave's penis and between his legs, working his fingers back and forth, and smiling as the tough and taciturn man squirmed. "China," Hal murmured into David's ear. "I've gotten rumours from the CIA computers for weeks, but it's taken me days to hack in and find anything positive."

"China?" Dave was not one to relinquish dominance, and he commenced stripping Hal naked. "Are you sure?" He turned the man to face the wall. "Because that could be a very tall order." Dave pressed his torso into the small of Hal's back, his vest clinging to both men's skin, and guided his cock between Hal's legs to tickle the back of his balls. "We could be headed for serious trouble. So, are you sure?"

"Nnn-! I'm sure!" Hal gasped, feeling fingers touch him, sliding inside him. "Jiuquan L-Launch Centre."

"That's in the Gobi desert," mused Dave, rolling a condom down the length of his penis. He shook his long, wet hair, sending a spray of water to join the streams running down Hal's quivering body. "I guess we don't have any reliable sources in the area, huh?" He said, pushing inside the man and reaching around to stroke his cock.

Hal moaned and panted as David thrust rhythmically, the intensity consuming him and his own penis starting to quiver. Dave's movements became more frantic and his thought processes faded, and moments later the two men came almost simultaneously. The soldier took Hal in his arms and turned around, so he was leaning against the bathroom wall with his lover pressed against his chest, and they were motionless for a few moments, simply holding one another.

"No," said Hal, eventually, raising his hand to stroke the back of David's neck. "No local contacts. It's hard enough to get a decent map. The whole thing is an undeniable risk, but if China's producing Metal Gears, can we afford to wait?"

"We've got two options. We can go into Beijing as tourists and do the whole thing on-site procurement, or we can go in through Mongolia and get equipped, but have to tab it," he said, nuzzling Hal's cheek, his stubble scratching against wet skin.

"I don't like the sound of a six-hundred kilometre hike through Mongolia at this time of year." The smaller man's teeth were beginning to chatter under the lukewarm water.

Dave turned the hot tap up, just for Hal, and they got washed. "So. For you to do your job, you need a powerful computer, which is fine to carry through customs, and lots of computer programs, which you can hide on other software or place on nanomachines."

"Basically."

"And for me to do mine, I need lots of firepower and an undetected entrance."

"Yes?"

"And I can parachute into Mongolia then hike a few hundred kilometres, and you can't."

"Hey!" Hal looked as indignant as anyone can while naked and covered in soap bubbles. "I did ten press ups!"

The mercenary rolled his eyes. "I acknowledge your ability to do ten press ups, but I can't carry you and all my gear through the Gobi desert." He grinned as Hal swatted ineffectually at him. "Tell me it doesn't make sense. You can fake whatever nerdy, scientific stuff you need, and bluff your way in. You're good enough to hide what you're doing, even if someone is watching. If all else screws up, you can wait until I detonate the thing then collect the data in the confusion."

The programmer didn't look happy. "That's not much of a plan, Dave. What makes you think they won't shoot all the scientists on the base if anything happens?"

"What, on a satellite launch centre? They blow up all the time." He turned the water off and pulled the shower curtain back, reaching for a towel. "Anyway, it's a crap plan because I don't have any intel. You've gotta get me more details."

"You got it, Snake. I left the computer searching for the spy-satellite photos." Hal padded gingerly across the cold tiles, rubbing himself with a rough towel and going into their bedroom for more dry clothes. "Just don't go rushing off at the first opportunity to fling yourself out of an aircraft and do anything without thinking about it. More haste, less speed, okay?" He rummaged through the bedside drawers, and pulled on fresh underwear as he moved the computer mouse to get rid of the screensaver. "Here we go. Come and have a look."

David came in wearing trousers, but no shirt. He sat in Hal's swivel chair, and frowned at the computer screen. "What do I press to zoom in?"

"It IS zoomed in. We're talking about the military secrets of the People's Republic of China here." The man could feel a knot of anxiety growing in his stomach. "Look, I might be wrong. I don't have anything other than some unusual movement on the spy photos, and a couple of little indicators. It's just that, they still don't have an effective navy, and most of their missile installations are aircraft interceptors. Their military is way overdue for modernisation, but where's their R and D budget going?" He chewed his lower lip, nervously. "I don't know if I'm right."

"It'll be better to go and be wrong, than do nothing and be right." Dave rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. He wished Hal had told him about this before, but there was almost nothing here, just a suspicion and a risk. "We're going to need more stealth than ever before. If we're quiet enough, we can check the place out and leave before anyone knows we're there."

"So you're not using the crazy wander-in-by-yourself idea?" Hal asked, hopefully.

"I need to see everything you've got," he said, ignoring the man. Hal sighed, and leaned over to bring up the suspicious spy pictures. Something huge and angular was moving through the desert under cover of night. "Can we get this in infra-red?"

He shook his head. "You're lucky to have this."

"Huh." One hand on his chin, he tapped the keyboard softly with the other. "Okay. What else is there?"

"It's hard to pick anything out," said Hal, bringing up more screens. "There's so much heavy industry in China, the components could be manufactured almost anywhere, and I can't go through all the accounts of all the factories in the whole countries, even assuming they haven't been tampered with. On top of that, neither of us speaks Cantonese, and machine translators are as good as useless for this kinda thing."

"So you're saying..."

The man gave a hopeless shrug. "I'm saying I don't have a lot for you."

David stared through the screen, his eyes focussed at some point in the middle distance. "Give me a minute to think about it."

Hal left the bedroom, and went into the tiny kitchen to make a pot of coffee. The fear in the pit of his stomach wasn't going away. If he was wrong, he could be sending them on a politically and personally dangerous wild goose chase. If he was right...

If he was right, they could be on the edge of nuclear war. Not some lunatic faction firing off a few isolated nukes, but two military superpowers blasting one another into radioactive oblivion. And not just them, either, but their allies too – the UK, Japan, Russia. Anywhere not hit by the bombs would be scoured clean of life by the cloud of radiation that would surround the world for – decades? Centuries? Ever?

He lay on the sofa and tried to stop thinking such irrational thoughts. If he hadn't created Metal Gear, someone else would have, so he could stop blaming himself and get on with working out a way to stop it. He forced himself to breathe slowly, wondering if there were any paper bags in the cupboard. Getting to his feet, he paced around the living room.

It was a short journey. They flitted from one small apartment to another these days, rarely staying anywhere more than a couple of months. Consequently, all their possessions amounted to whatever could be fit into the boot of whatever cheap, usually ageing, car they were presently using. It was not a natural way of life for either man, and Hal missed his anime and his toys almost as much as David missed his dogs. At least there were no more embarrassing naked confrontations, or arguments over who got the bedroom.

For a moment, Hal thought longingly of the days when he could have as many computers as he wanted, and was more or less expected to blow them up on a regular basis. You don't employ a revolutionary computer genius who doesn't leave a trail of smoking Mac husks behind him every evening. If you can go forty-eight hours without destroying a computer, you're just not revolutionary enough. He sighed. No. Bad Hal. Mysterious governmental organisations with unlimited funds are a cause for suspicion, not printing out a CV and getting your interview suit dry-cleaned.

"Hal!" Yelled Dave. "Coffee?"

He got the man a coffee, and took it into the bedroom. "I sometimes think you don't appreciate me," he said, sliding the mug onto the desk. "It was difficult getting those pictures."

Dave glanced up sharply, as if he'd been shaken out of thought. "You usually do a lot better than this."

"Usually the operation isn't based in a communist country with a language I don't know." He sat on the bed. "What about the girls? They probably speak Cantonese. I mean, you know, write it."

"Don't trust them," said the man, gloomily. "And I don't think they'd get involved anyway. Their only allegiance is to themselves." He folded his arms over his chest, and span the chair around to face Hal. "We're going to have to reconnoitre this one ourselves, I think. I don't know who else we can call on without all kinds of repercussions going off."

"Surely, there's international committees set up to deal with this," said Hal weakly, drawing his knees up to his chest and hugging them. "Seven years of back-and-forth legal wrangling and inconclusive inspections, leading to some weak sanctions that are largely ignored?"

"The you-know-who wouldn't stand for it. Oil-producing nations rattling the bars now and then are tolerated, but China would be seen as a direct threat." He sank down in the chair and stretched out his legs, resting them on the bed. "It IS a direct threat, whether China launches or not. It'll be an arms race, the Cold War all over again."

There was that fear again. "You think we can stop it?" Hal asked, in a small voice.

David slid further down, and his voice was muffled. "I don't see who else could even try."

He reached out and stroked the man's leg, feeling the cords of muscle under warm skin. "Are we good enough?"

The soldier jumped up, spluttering. "Of course we're good enough! We're the fucking _best_." He turned back to the computer. "Book yourself a ticket to Beijing for next Monday. That'll give me a good five days to make my way to the launch site, plenty of time. You'll have to disguise yourself. It'll be much easier to get around without giving yourself away before everything kicks off, and it'll make our exfil a lot safer." He glanced over his shoulder. "You'll be some kind of science professor, or... How young could you make yourself look? Maybe an exchange student or something like that, as harmless as possible. There won't be a regular bus service to the base, and it's probably too short notice to try and arrange anything official, but, let's see..." He was typing 'Beijing tourist transport' into Google.

"What if I'm wrong?" Blurted Hal.

"If you're wrong, we meet up in Suzhou and spend the week sightseeing."

"You don't think I'm wrong, do you?"

"I'd love you to be wrong, I've always wanted to see Beijing."


	2. Chapter 2

Smoke

Freezing air rushed past the man as he stood in the open cargo doors. Far below him, a land of yellows and browns stretched to the horizons. He gripped the pilot chute tightly in his hand, and prepared himself for the jump.

Hal had driven him to the airfield; anxious and trying not to show it, chatting too casually, too loudly. The last three days had been a sleepless rush of planning, phoning, asking, purchasing. In something like an old-fashioned mathematics question, an operation that would take the entire Department of Defence a month to arrange could be done by two people working alone in substantially less than a week.

It had been worryingly easy to find a pilot who'd decided that, for enough money, he didn't really mind why the madman wanted to parachute into the middle of the desert. He probably thought it was some kind of elaborate suicide bid, intentional or not.

David had been a little depressed that the clone girls had become an organised crime syndicate, but at least they'd been willing to donate to Philanthropy.

"It's not an organised crime!" Hal protested, as they took a rare five-minute break. "Big companies make so much profit that it just widens the gap between the rich and the poor."

"But who's gonna get sacked if the bosses decide their bonuses aren't big enough? The regular joes serving coffee, or working the sewing machines." He doubted strongly that social idealism had ever been their aim.

"They're like Robin Hood."

He rolled his eyes. "Robin Hood didn't run a fur farm."

"It's not a fur farm! It's a mink zoo!"

"You're so goddamn gullible." At that, he'd pulled Hal into his lap and started nipping and licking at his throat, while working his hand down the man's trousers...

More like a fifteen-minute break.

Snake leaned forward, falling out of the door and into the high, rarefied air four kilometres up. He thought of nothing, stretching out and lying on nothing, as relaxed as if he'd been lounging on a beach. Hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, from anyone who would be interested enough to kill him. It was like being safe.

The altimeter beeped his codec, and he unclenched his fist from around the crumpled nylon chute. It hurtled away from him, betraying the speed of his descent and dragging out the main canopy. The folds of dark green material opened with a gentle bump that startled him more than a violent jerk would have done. He looked down at his feet, the miles of brown landscape under them growing more detailed by the second. He'd given himself plenty of space to slow down. There was no need for a daredevil HALO jump here. The risk of being spotted was nothing beside the risk of a broken leg.

There were large holes in the back of the canopy, which had alarmed Hal until he'd explained that they'd let him slow his descent down. He used them now, facing himself into the warm, dry breeze and drifting like a giant leaf to the sandy surface of the desert. It wasn't as soft and yielding as it appeared, but he landed on his feet and ran forward so the collapsing 'chute wouldn't cover him. Pulling himself free from the harness, he folded up the thin, silky material and trapped the unwieldy bundle under a rock.

Finding his map and his compass in his pack, Snake took his bearings. There was no GPS here. The pilot had been helpful and the landing had been good, and he could judge his location to within a kilometre or so, but humans had notoriously poor dead reckoning, and that would slip. Featureless rock and sand was all that could be seen in every direction, providing no landmarks. There was water to be found, as well as lizards and insects. A man could survive, if he knew what he was doing and where he was going.

He hefted his pack onto his shoulders, and started walking.

* * *

If there was one place where it was hard to maintain a disguise, it was an international airport. They were full of detectors and dogs and men who had no compunctions about searching you very thoroughly indeed. Hal's disguise had to be near as dammit perfect and permanent.

There was an implant in his inner thigh, where a cursory search would miss it, that was giving out a peptide hormone that was setting off his alpha-melanocytes. It was only in clinical trials at the moment, and had been hard to get hold of, but it had been worth it. It was a substantial part of his masquerade. For the first time since he was seven years old, Hal had a deep, all-over tan.

On top of the drastic darkening of his skin, he'd dispensed with his usual wire-framed spectacles in favour of a pair of black plastic sunglasses over brown contact lenses. His hair, which had been allowed to grow unchecked for the past four months, had been tied into a short pony-tail and darkened with a touch of wet gel. Ten days' worth of facial hair provided a passable beard, once it had been neatly trimmed. He was wearing shiny black shoes, pinstripe trousers, a pale blue shirt, and a silk tie with an oddly hypnotic pattern of purple squares on it. He felt stupid but, more importantly, looked like a swarthy, well-travelled and confident researcher, instead of a pale, frightened computer engineer.

Getting through the airport at Seattle had been a breeze, and he didn't share his partner's paranoia about sleeping on planes, so the journey hadn't been too bad. The grim-faced, uniformed men at the airport in Beijing had made him sweat a little, but he could put that down to the heat, which had hit him like opening an oven door when he stepped off the aircraft.

For a moment, unbidden and unwanted thoughts of Snake filled his mind, images of a lone man walking over orange sand, the very air around him boiled into a wavering haze. With an effort he pulled himself back to the present, scanning the bustling airport for the man he was meeting.

Chen Wong was a chemical physicist and head of Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre ceramics research department. His website on the composition and uses of ablative shielding on recoverable orbital modules had been thorough, educational and resoundingly dull. On the phone, he'd spoken good English with a clear British accent, and sounded like a venerable Chinese master out of a film. In person, standing in the middle of a jostling crowd and holding a sign marked "Andrew Jones", he looked like a shrivelled old man with liver spots on his bald head. When Hal shook his hand, it was like holding a lizard, limp and soft and bony.

The old man was excited to see him. Not enough people today were interested in the physical sciences, he said, too many bright youngsters drawn by the easier money in biochemistry or medicine. He was flattered that Andrew would be interested in including his little square of Inner Mongolia for his ten-year study on microbial corrosion of ceramics under conditions of extreme temperature fluctuation. His seniors had been very impressed by MIT's prior record on developing heat shielding materials, and they were glad to welcome such an esteemed professor.

Hal smiled. He was the confident, outspoken representative of an international research project, with a sun tan and an expense account, and he exuded elite nerd-chic as he and Chen talked. When he'd suggested food, the man took him to small restaurant where he had the most delicious Chinese meal of his life. As they ate, he showed Chen his computer, containing all the data he'd collected so far from sites all over the world.

It was a marvellously crafted piece of fiction, and Hal had no doubts about it being able to fool even such an expert as was sat across the table from him. In many ways, the fake data was an unnecessary risk - he'd already won this man's confidence, and every detail he revealed could be the one that gave him away as a spy. David might have told him not to do it, but David had been away for almost a week; once Hal had run out of documents to forge and contacts to arrange, he'd needed something to keep him continually busy.

Chen glanced at the laptop's clock, and commented that if it was accurate, they'd better move back to the airport. The aircraft that would take them to Jiquan was only a little twelve-seater, but it couldn't wait for them. They still had a very long way to go, and the small aircraft buzzed along for six hours over cities, then farmland, then sandy plains. Night had fallen by the time they reached the small town, and Hal's disguised alter-ego Andrew and his elderly companion were still far from exhausting the conversational possibilities of ceramics degradation.

The plane had finally bounced down onto the airfield, and Chen had led him through the streets, lit mostly by lamps in windows. It was quiet; there were no sounds of distant traffic or machinery. He tried not to gape at the sights around him like a tourist, but even in the dark he couldn't help but stare at the white-painted buildings and fluttering cloth hangings. They arrived at a hotel, and the Chinese man spoke to the woman sitting in the foyer, who had been watching a small, flickering television. Hal smiled and gave her some money, and she smiled back and showed him to his room. The walls were white, and the floor was cold stone, and there was a bed. Two doors down the corridor was a bathroom. He thanked the woman, and Chen, and said goodnight.

When they had gone, the first thing Hal did was go into the bathroom and wash, standing up, with a sink-full of tepid water. International spying was about a thousand times less glamorous than he'd imagined, involving mostly being crammed onto aircraft like a live veal export and listening to boring people droning on about boring things, with all the while the threat of horrible death hanging over your head. He scrubbed the sweat and grease off his skin, and felt less dishevelled, but also more awake.

The bed wasn't very comfortable. It was like a futon, and didn't help him get to sleep at all. He lay there, thinking of David. It had taken all of Hal's persuasion and forging abilities to get him a few hours on the launch centre, convincing everybody who needed it that he was taking part in a global effort to improve heat shielding, and that if they didn't get China's input, all sorts of gently probing questions would be raised. But what if David wasn't there? What if he'd been delayed, or had gotten lost, or been caught by the border guards? What if he'd been killed by nothing more suspicious or discriminating than thirst? Hal wouldn't be able to hack in and collect data without a distraction, and he certainly wouldn't be able to destroy a Metal Gear by himself.

What if David wasn't there, and there was no Metal Gear? If Hal had wasted the man's life on a paranoid interpretation of unclear intelligence?

He curled up on his side, and briefly tried the codec. It registered only static. Of course, they were still a long way away from the launch site, and the site itself covered a vast area. The man could still be a hundred and seventy kilometres away, well out of the range of communication. Knowing this didn't comfort Hal at all.

His fingers itched to get his computer and start readying the programs he'd need for tomorrow, but the laptop would probably be inspected on the way in. It would be better to spend an hour tomorrow untying them from the reams of fake report text, then to risk discovery.

He tried to imagine what David would sound like after days walking through trackless, dry wastes. He shouldn't have let him go. Nobody could do it. Hal had seen pictures of people rescued from the desert after plane wrecks, sick and weak, more withered than Chen.

Chen Wong. He might be dull, but Hal had never seen anyone so enthusiastic about ceramics, especially after apparent centuries of studying the subject. He felt worse about tricking the man than he did about destabilising the power balance of the planet, and possibly plunging the world into a final, apocalyptic war. Spy manuals didn't mention that, just like they didn't list ways to unstick your rumpled trousers from your sweaty groin without getting slapped or arrested.

He wondered if Revolver Ocelot ever felt like this. Maybe not now, but when he was younger. How had he felt the first time he'd smiled at someone while he was stabbing them in the back?

He couldn't imagine Revolver Ocelot ever being young.

Eventually, he fell asleep, and his disordered thoughts turned into dark and chaotic dreams.

* * *

The road to the launch centre was long and straight, and lined with poplar trees. A soldier had come to pick them up in a battered and ancient but sturdy and reliable jeep, and was roaring along the broad, empty highway at considerable speed, presumably to drown out the sound of two scientists talking about the relative merits of titanium dioxide. They reached the base a lot sooner than Hal had expected, and he made up his mind to memorise the number plate and steal this vehicle when it was time to leave. The guards took one look at the gibberish on his laptop and passed him over to the security technicians, who were also too bored to try and examine it properly.

The doubts of last night had been forgotten. Right now, he was a veritable chameleon. No mere man on guard duty could stand the onslaught of concentrated chemical-physics jargon he was prepared to give them, whereas technicians crowded eagerly around him, wanting to hear his opinions on the latest developments in ablative shielding.

A glowering soldier, who clearly felt he'd drawn the short straw, led Hal over to a breeze-block shed full of tile samples. He been informed that he must stay in the shed at all times, not try and investigate other parts of the compound, not to wander off without an escort, not to look in anything marked "All foreigners past this line will be shot, survivors will be shot again".

He took out a piece of equipment that would emit a chorus of dummy signals, in case they were scanning the airwaves for codec transmissions. Half an hour with a soldering iron and some scrap plastic had transformed it into a magic tile scanner, as well. He plugged it into his laptop's USB port, turned it on, and moved the first tile through it, before trying to raise his partner.

"Snake?"

"Right on time, Otacon."

It was his deep, gruff voice, and Hal could so clearly picture the little quirk of his lip as he spoke that was the nearest he usually got to a smile that it hurt. "Where are you?" He asked, pretending to be translating the data from his tile-scanning machine into a table.

"About five k away from you, in some trees. Otacon... you were right."

"What?"

"You were right."

* * *

He heard the man talking to himself about tiles on the other end of the codec, and realised he must have made his last exclamation out loud. After a few seconds of play-acting extreme excitement over dielectric response and positive thermal coefficient, Hal's voice returned. "There's really one here? Have you found it?"

"Yeah." Snake scratched the thick, gritty beard on his chin. "It's in an underground chamber below the pad ten kilometres North from you."

"LA2B pad 138?"

"If you say so. I snuck down an air-conditioning duct. It's too far underground for codec to work, but it looks like it's ready to go at any time."

"God!" It sounded like Hal had done it again, and once again had to make out that whatever he was studying had him in raptures. "What are we going to do?"

"You're gonna pull all the data you can off it, and I'm gonna blow it up."

"How? I'm not even near an internet port here, never mind anything that could access a Metal Gear's systems."

"Don't give me that. You spend the defence budget of a small nation on computer gadgets. You must have something on you that I can plug into the thing, so you can take what you need." Dave looked at the map he'd sketched of the launch site. "Tell the guard that you need to use the bathroom, and leave it in there. I'll come and fetch it."

"Alright. I'll turn the codec off when I'm away from the scrambler, though." There was more talk, some words of Chinese from Hal, then nothing but static. Snake waited patiently in the shade under the rows of poplar trees for the man to return.

He was impressed with his partner for getting in here. It had been dangerous to try. The legendary mercenary would take a hike of hundreds of kilometres through endless, trackless wilderness over getting past international airport security any day.

"Alright, I've done it," came Hal's voice, suddenly. "It's in the toilets on the East wing of the ground floor of the telemetry station, second stall from the right."

Snake set off. He didn't like moving around here during the daytime, but at least he could stick to the tree-cover of the road for most of the way. Slinking around the building until he found an open window, he climbed in and sneaked into the bathroom. Hal had hidden the small gadget, that looked like it was mostly aerial, inside the toilet roll on top of the cistern. Once he was out of the telemetry station and back under cover, he contacted Otacon again. "Got it. What do I need to do?"

"You need to plug it into an access point on the machine. There'll be one in the cockpit, but there should be others too, lower down. If there's already a computer hooked up to it, just attach it to the computer."

"Got it."

"Make sure it's the right way up when you plug it in, and if it won't go, don't try and force it. Okay?"

"Hey, that only happened once, and it was an accident!"

"Okay, okay, sorry. I'm just nervous."

"Don't worry. No-one knows I'm even here." He turned the codec off, and made his way to the launch pad, an area where he couldn't even rely on the tree-lined road to hide him. It took over an hour for him to work his way from patch of shadow to patch of shadow, making certain that nobody saw him. The air conditioning duct was a cramped and awkward climb, but he'd done it once already, and it wasn't long before he was unscrewing another mesh grille and swinging down to the floor.

Above ground, Jiquan was a rectangle of dusty gravel enclosing a sparse collection of buildings with the familiar shabby look of structures that had been built in the 1950s and never refurbished or replaced. At a subterranean level, it was the cool, dim laboratory of a mad scientist. Wires dangled from the walls and ceiling, like arteries nourishing a metal womb. Banks of computers hummed softly, providing a soft, white illumination. Huge hydraulic pipes stood gleaming in every corner, waiting to raise the whole thing to the surface.

On a central dais stood the hulking, humongous figure of a Metal Gear. It had been painted black, and seemed to fade into the darkness above it, only the gleam of its cockpit revealing its height. It hunched in silent menace, as if watching what happened before it.

Snake was already making his way down to the computers, dropping silently from one platform to another. He couldn't see any guards, but that didn't mean there weren't any. He didn't bother approaching the front of the computers, instead creeping through the darkness behind them and plugging in Hal's gadget.

A few seconds later, his codec bleeped. Startled, he answered it.

"Good work, Snake!" It was Hal, sounding excited. "I should have everything I need in a few minutes, then you can do your thing."

"How are you calling me when I'm down here?" Asked the man, suspiciously.

"The thing you installed was..." Hal suddenly fell silent. Internal alarms began to clamour in Snake's head. They were justified when Hal abruptly hissed, "Snake, get out of there!"

"What's happening?" He demanded, jumping to his feet. Before his partner could answer, the ground beneath his feet began to shake. A klaxon sounded, as the mighty hydraulic rams began their slow task of hauling the hidden laboratory to the surface. A spear of light cut through the underground gloom, widening every moment as the vast doors slid open to allow the Metal Gear access to the world above.

The man didn't panic. He ran to the edge of the moving gantry and leapt onto the metal platforms he'd descended by. There was no time to crawl back up the ventilation shaft. Prepared to snap necks, he ran up the stairs to the exit trapdoor, but encountered no one. He didn't panic. This was an automated test. There was nothing to panic about. He skidded into what scant cover the edge of the launch pad could offer, and took stock of his inventory. An M9 and enough C4 to blow that thing into a construction kit. Fine. Everything was still going to plan. He would hide out until the fuss died down, then take out that Metal Gear.

The machine's pointed, black head began to rear above the lip of the yawning pit. It looked like shadows had been poured into a mould and frozen to make it. It stood motionless, the harsh sunlight unable to warm its metal skin. Snake crouched in the shade it cast for long moments.

At length, he recovered enough to call Otacon. "It's alright. I'll just-"

With a roar of machinery, the Metal Gear reared up and fired a missile.


	3. Chapter 3

Warnings for hot man-love and political concepts. This story is entirely fictional, remember! Hal and Dave belong to Hideo Kojima. I don't respond to reviews because I feel like if I did, you'd realise how much I suck and stop reading, but they do make me get the next chapter done faster!

* * *

Smoke

Otacon stared numbly at the screen of his computer, forgetting his charade of tile-study as he read and re-read the data he'd extracted. It was in English, and he guessed that the Metal Gear and its operating system had been purchased from America. It indicated that this unit had been programmed to fire a single missile at a muzzle speed of fifteen kilometres per second. That was fast enough to wreck the railgun, and tear the rest of the machine apart, but apparently, that wouldn't matter.

China had at least a hundred of these things.

He stared at the last part in numb disbelief, trying to discover what the solitary missile's intended location was, whether Snake had been an observer to the bullet that started the war. The information didn't seem to be anywhere he could get to without breaking through the security, and even if he could do that fast enough, he wasn't thousands of miles away, chuckling to himself as their network tried to lock him out. He was in the middle of the tigers' den, and his first mistake would be his last. Even he wasn't _that_ good.

Suddenly Hal became aware of the codec's alarm beeping in his ear. "What?" He asked, breathlessly.

"What do you mean, what? They fired off a fucking nuke!"

"Yeah." His eyes were fixed on the screen, his fingers flying over the keys, blind to everything else. "Snake, get out of there. The Metal Gear is trashed already, and unless you found an army of them on this base, we've got bigger fish to fry."

"An army of them?"

"At least a hundred. They must have been producing these on an industrial scale. We've got to-"

A heavy hand fell on Otacon's shoulder, and thought his heart would stop. He sat frozen, in front of his computer, like a rabbit dazzled by headlights. The man behind him was saying something in Chinese, and Hal turned slowly, his heart hammering and his eyes wide behind his plastic sunglasses. The guard shook him, tugging him to his feet. "Get up. You come with me."

"I, uh." His mouth was too dry to speak, and he had to clear his throat. As he stood, he reached out with shaky hands to close his laptop. "W-what's happening?"

Clearly, the soldiers' English was as good as Hal's Chinese. "You come with me," he repeated, his left hand holding his rifle ready, trying to push the scientist out of the door.

Otacon was certain he was going to die as he unplugged all of his equipment and scooped it back into his bag, then followed the guard out of the hut; but instead of being shot the second he set foot outside, he realised he was being led back to the telemetry building. With anxious glances left and right, he realised that squads of armed men were running across the dusty ground towards the launch pad. Cautiously, Otacon turned on his codec. "Snake," he murmured. "I think they know you're here."

"What! How?"

"Probably sensors on the Metal Gear." He flicked his eyes towards his guard. "It might not be safe for me to talk, I've had to shut down the security devices. Where are you? There are about twenty soldiers headed your way."

When Snake spoke again, he was breathing heavily. "Otacon, could you get out of here without me?"

He fought down the urge to tell his partner to quit smoking. "Not without ditching my computer."

"Right." There was gunfire and shouting in the background, and the transmission was abruptly cut off. Otacon's hands tightened around his laptop, and he stumbled after the guard and into the building.

"Andrew!" Hal looked up, blinking hard. It was Chen. "Are you all right? Come in here."

"What's happening?" Otacon asked, looking around wildly.

The man waved an arm, dismissively. "There was a launch test a few minutes ago, and we've detected an intruder near the pad. It's probably a false alarm."

There was some excited shouting from the other occupants of the room, calling Chen over. They'd managed to get a partial feed from the external cameras of the damaged Metal Gear, and were watching as the soldiers laid a trail of crossfire through a brake of poplar trees. Hal watched, mesmerised, as they charged after the intruder.

He'd often viewed Snake from this angle, as a tiny figure on a monitor, running silently towards or away from something. His nails dug into his palms as he watched his partner stumble, a bloody rent torn in his arm. The next bullet would strike between his shoulderblades, sending the man skidding face-first in the dust. Otacon shut his eyes. Beside him, Chen muttered what was probably a swearword, and began calling out instructions, incomprehensible to the American.

When Otacon pulled up the courage to look at the screen again, there were men scattered on the ground, lying where they fell, and Snake was gone. He didn't waste time trying to work out how or where. From the launch pad, it would take the man maybe forty minutes to reach him. He had to find out everything he could without getting shot and get hold of a vehicle before that.

"What were you testing?" He asked Chen.

"I can't really tell you," replied the man, distractedly. "But we're studying new ways of neutralising targets in orbit. We've used one of our old weather satellites as a dummy; should be getting the information back soon. I didn't have a lot to do with the project, in all honesty." Still, the man seemed pleased with himself, his wrinkled face creasing into a broad smile as he looked over the mission data they'd collected so far. "I don't know what drew our young dissident friend out there," he said, cocking his head towards the monitor while his attention stayed with the computer screen he was working on, "But I've suggested that the others secure the computer systems and go down to the shelter in the basement. I shouldn't imagine the young man will want anything to do with us, but it is better to be safe than to be sorry, eh?"

"Yes," agreed Otacon. He felt distant and untouchable, as if he was playing a computer game, not prying secret information out of a Chinese rocket scientist. "I heard some machinery going while I was working out there. It sounded like something big."

"Very big. We keep it underground, I believe. I've only seen the specifications, but I've submitted a dozen proposals to improve it, all rejected for some reason." He tutted. "Anything so inflexible is never going to be a lot of use, but it seems we've got some interesting data out of it." With one withered hand, he patted the top of the computer.

Otacon kept compulsively checking the time. He had to get out of here, find a jeep with a full fuel tank, get it started. The old man had started talking about the chemical composition of the missile, the graphite coating that reduced air resistance by thirty per cent. Shortly, he was going to ask the foreign scientist if the research he'd done here had been any use so far. He had to get out of here before that happened.

"Say," he blurted. "Is it okay if I use the bathroom?"

Chen said something vague in assent, and Otacon fled.

There was a window in the bathroom, but it was small, and wouldn't open wide enough to let him out. The sound of breaking glass would surely attract attention. He searched through his gear until he found his pencil case, and took out a small flat file. After a few minutes' furious, knuckle-grazing work on the ends of the pins holding them in the frames, the window could be slid out and lowered gingerly to the floor.

He pushed his holdall out first, wincing as it thudded to the ground, sending up a cloud of dust. It was a close fit, but after a second of hideous panic and some unpleasant scraping on the steel window frame, he fell heavily in a heap beside his bag. With a lot of bruises but also a strange feeling of pride that he'd just done something that Snake definitely couldn't, he set off for the vehicle bay.

It was the middle of the day, and there was no cover whatsoever. He felt as if he were carrying around a neon sign saying, 'shoot me!' He wished that he still had his stealth cammo, but carrying it through an international airport or into the satellite base would have been enormously ill-advised. In a kind of hunched run, he jogged the eight hundred or so metres to where a few jeeps were parked, roughly equidistant between the few large buildings. All had the keys in the ignition, but they also had less than half a tank of fuel each, plenty for running around the base, but a death sentence for two men trying to escape through hundreds of miles of hostile territory. Growing increasingly frantic with each passing second, he rummaged desperately in the back of the machines until he found what he needed – a fuel can and a length of hosepipe.

With efficient and practised movements, he siphoned the petrol from the other machines, and poured it into the tank of the jeep he'd had his eye on earlier. When it was full, he hefted the battered metal cans into the back of it, as well as a few things that looked useful from the other vehicles, a tool kit, spare tyres, that sort of thing. As a squad of soldiers jogged past, he hid behind the jeep. Hiding from people who weren't looking for him had always been his favourite part of these missions.

He had too much faith in his partner and too much guilt about what they were doing to pray that Snake would be safe. Otacon crouched in the shadows and waited.

* * *

There weren't any dogs on the base.

-He was bleeding from a dozen places, his left arm was worse than useless, he'd managed to circle back and lose his pursuers but they'd be on him any second, there was a four kilometre sprint with no cover before he reached Hal -

But there weren't any dogs on the base, and there wasn't any rain or anything else to disable the stealth cammo, and if he kept running he'd make it. It would have been a straight line, if it hadn't been for the guards, if it hadn't been for the sensors, if it hadn't been for the horrible terrain of this place.

-Fired a fucking _nuke_, everything they'd fought for destroyed, hadn't got here soon enough, should have pushed himself harder -

There were the vehicles, boxy things painted in dusty khaki colours, the bright dot on his radar showing where Hal was. His steady, heavy footfalls carried him to the jeep, and he shut the stealth cammo off as he fell into the passenger seat through the open door. Someone reached across him and slammed it shut, then gunned the engine.

"There's a first aid kit by your feet." As first words after a week apart went it was hardly romantic, but it was exactly what Snake wanted to hear right now. He slung his pack onto the back seat and reached for the white box. "Can you take care of it by yourself?"

"Yeah, it's just a scratch." He grimaced at his left forearm, then glanced up at the man driving the jeep. "Jesus! Otacon?"

The dark, well-dressed man with the stylish beard flashed him a brief grin, proud of his disguise even in the chaos of their exfiltration. "Yep."

"You look... different."

"Well, you look terrible. Is your arm broken?"

"Don't know." He looked in the wing mirror. "The guards are already following us." As if this place was going to be anything except a radioactive crater in half an hour.

"I know." They'd passed the boundary of the launch site, and Otacon was still accelerating. "They won't catch us in those, but I want to get as far away as I can before the shooting starts, because all their fuel is in the back of our truck."

Snake gritted his teeth as the jeep gave an unsteady lurch, and looked back into the mirror. The pursuit had lasted for a few hundred metres, before the engines must have started to splutter and die. He saw a man jump out and kick at a tyre in frustration, before they disappeared from view. "Good thinking," he said, returning his attention to stopping the bloodflow. "But we've got to-"

"I know. It's alright. I've already got our destination drawn on the map. Snake, I need you to take the wheel for a minute." Otacon's voice was eerily calm. "Just grab the wheel, okay?"

He reached over with his uninjured right hand, and was going to ask what was going on, when Otacon took a metal glasses-case from his pocket, awkwardly pushed himself up in the seat, and took his trousers down. He drew something from the tin, and pulled its cap off, and Snake realised it was a scalpel just before his partner stuck it into his own thigh. "Jesus! Otacon! What the hell are you doing?"

He didn't answer immediately, occupied as he was with digging at the inside of his own leg. "Gnn... It's a h-hormone implant..." Triumphantly, the man held up a small cylinder of bloodied white plastic. "Whew! That wasn't too bad. It's what gave me the sun tan," he told Snake, as he tossed it out of the window. He stuck a plaster over the small wound and hitched his trousers back up, then leaned towards the rear-view mirror to poke at his eyes. "Y'know, I'm just not a contact-lens kind of person. I've been terrified that these things would slip and sever my optic nerves or something." When he sat down, his eyes were grey again, and he fumbled in the case on his lap for his glasses before taking hold of the steering wheel again. "Thanks. Sorry. How are you?"

"They launched a fucking NUKE!" yelled Snake. "It won't matter what you look like, because the world is about to-!"

"Oh – it was a dummy rocket." Otacon adjusted his glasses. "I'm almost certain it was fired at a defunct Chinese weather satellite, too. It might really have been a test."

"I - what? A test?"

"No-one's been nuked, Snake."

Slowly, his partner's words percolated through the mercenaries' shell-shocked mind, shutting down clanging alarms as they did so. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. Do you have a radio? We need a news source, and BBC world service is the only reliable one we're likely to find here."

He unclipped his radio from his belt and tossed it to Otacon. As the fact that they weren't all going to die in a nuclear holocaust sunk in, adrenaline ebbed away and the fact that he'd been shot became more pressing. "Rrr, fuck. I think my arm is broken. Where are we going?"

"A town. We'll change the jeep for something less incriminating, and think about what we're going to do next once we get there." Otacon was dividing his attention between avoiding obstacles and tuning the radio in, a complicated affair involving many buttons and switches. "There's painkillers in the medical kit. You should take some."

"No chance. I'll be out of it for hours."

"We're going to be driving for hours. You may as well get some sleep."

He took them, although he didn't want to. The rush of combat was still buzzing madly in his head, even as it drained from his veins. He wanted to stay alert in case the soldiers from the base caught up with them, in case the hulking shadow of a Metal Gear appeared behind them, in case a thousand unspecified threats lurched out at them. Across from him, over the sound of the engine, Hal was talking, going on and on about ceramics or some shit, and the sound of his voice was a quiet constant that followed Snake into his dreams.

* * *

He was awake for a long time before he opened his eyes.

Snake was lying on his back on top of something soft. He was naked, and the gritty itchiness of surviving in a desert for days was gone. It was shady but warm, and an open window stirred a lazy breeze over his bare skin now and then. It also brought sounds of passing cars and a hubbub of voices from the street outside. He could smell traffic and fried food and the usual things a hot city smelled like. He was thirsty, but he knew that the moment he moved from this comfortable daydream, everything would hurt.

There were footsteps, and he cracked an eye open. Otacon was moving back and forth in front of the window, spreading something out. Snake suddenly felt the wave of relief and love he was sure he was meant to earlier, the fear he hadn't allowed himself to feel earlier realised and resolved in a single moment. He summed up his emotions in a single word. "Hey."

Hal started and turned, smiling widely. "Hey! I was beginning to think you'd _never_ wake up. How'd you feel?"

He cautiously tried to lever himself up a little on his good arm. "Not too bad."

"That's good." The man walked over and gave him a two-litre bottle of water with the cap taken off, which Snake drained. When he looked up again, Hal was struggling out of his jeans. The empty plastic bottle fell to the floor forgotten as Hal climbed onto the bed, sliding his bare legs over Snake's gauze-patched ones. He took his glasses off, folding them and putting them down with a familiar little clatter.

"Wait," said Snake. "I must've lost a pint of blood. I might not be able to-"

"No, I think you're okay," Hal said, glancing down. He took the man's stiffening cock in his hand, and kissed him hard on the mouth. Relishing the stubble scraping over his clean-shaven skin, he moved to press his lips against Snake's neck.

"Fine," the mercenary growled, his voice trembling just a little from the attention. "But I don't feel like doing the hard work."

Hal just looked him in the eye and grinned, then lowered his head and explored every inch of his lover's body with his fingertips and tongue. Running his hands over the man's skinny back as if to remind himself that he was still the strong one, Snake found it was easy for him to give up control, to not make any demands on his body, to simply allow himself to respond to his partner's touch. When the man pulled away, he wondered idly if he should turn over, but no, Hal turned back and rolled a condom down Snake's erect penis, before moving his hand between his own thighs.

As he realised with a fresh surge of arousal what Hal was doing, Snake was transfixed by the expression on his face. The man was gazing down, his lower lip was caught between his teeth, going red under his fading tan, either concentrating or embarrassed or both as he prepared himself. Some of Snake's thoughts became disjointed and others became acutely focussed as Hal pushed himself down onto his cock.

He reached out to put his hands on Hal's waist, feeling the heat of sweat-damp skin under his fingers. Hal seemed to know what he wanted to do, and Snake couldn't motivate himself to move – all he wanted was to watch the man above him. It seemed to him that he came quickly, but that almost didn't seem to be the point, not when Hal touched himself, jerky movements timed awkwardly with the thrust of his hips.

He leaned back, and came over his own stomach. For a moment he just stayed there, panting hard, his hair sticking out at odd angles from the sweat, legs trembling a little from exhaustion. Suddenly, he raised himself up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He teased the used condom off, padded across the room, and went into the bathroom.

Snake just lay there, feeling the sweat dry on his body. As an afterthought, he raised his left arm to inspect the damage he'd sustained earlier. There was a thin plaster cast over one side, but the cut in his skin was covered by gauze bandages. It was light and compact, and more importantly, it had stopped his arm hurting. He looked up as Hal walked back in. "Nice job," he said, gesturing to the cast.

"Thanks." The man reached over for his glasses, and flopped down onto the bed beside him.

"I really missed you."

Hal rolled over to face him, smiling again. "Really? I thought you lived for the times where you get to carry out world-saving missions that would be suicide for any other man."

"Yeah, but I really missed you." It was too hot to hug. Snake reached out lazily to touch Hal's hand with his fingertips. "That was a good disguise. I wouldn't have recognised you if it hadn't been for the codec." Not true. He'd become too well acquainted with his partner's body to be fooled by any camouflage or mask. He'd probably recognise Hal if the man was piloting a Metal Gear, just from the way he made it move. "Never imagined you with dark skin before."

"You look pretty strange yourself." Hal reached out, tracing shapes on Snake's face. "Have you seen a mirror lately?"

"Heh." He looked at the backs of his hands. They were deeply tanned, cutting off abruptly at the line of his sleeve. His face would be similarly marked.

"Are you going to shave?"

"You think I should?"

"I think you'd regret missing the opportunity to if you didn't."

There was a long moment of silence. A fly buzzed and banged against the open window, before accidentally finding its way out of the room. Snake felt strangely reluctant to speak, but knew he had to. "You hear anything on the radio yet?"

Hal sat up, looking puzzled. "Yes! It really was just a dummy missile fired into an old Chinese satellite, corroborated by multiple sources. I don't understand. What do they achieve by giving away their plans like that?"

"You said that Metal Gear was destroyed after it fired the missile."

"Yeah! I don't know what they were trying to do. There's no way the railgun could take a charge like that, and the rest of the machine would have been shaken apart by the stresses of the launch. It doesn't make any sense to do something you know will wreck the Metal Gear just to hit one of your own satellites."

He needed a cigarette, and gingerly pushed himself up. "Then it was a demonstration. Everyone can see that they've fired a missile into orbit, one that was undetectable until it hit its target." His pack was leaning against the side of the bed, and he leaned over to rummage through it. "Think about what we've got circling around up there, Hal. Telecommunications. GPS. Orbiting anti-missile platforms. China just made the most globally aggressive move so far this decade."

Hal looked confused. "What are you talking about? Wars have been waged, terrorists have-"

Snake made a dismissive gesture, still searching through his gear. "I'm not talking about a world power attacking some little third-world country, or vice versa. I'm talking about one world power sending a message to another. Playing for supremacy on an international field." There they were. He moved over to the window, put a cigarette between his lips and lit up. "I'm talking about politics with guns."

Sitting on the other side of the bed, the programmer was quiet for a moment. "But... why?"

"Damned if I know. We'd better find the rest of their Metal Gear army before they explain it to us."


	4. Chapter 4

You thought I'd forgotten, but here's a new chapter! Thanks to the reviewers, and super thanks to PirateShotgun for all the encouragement and kicking. Hal, Dave and the Metal Gears belong to Hideo Kojima, China belongs to the gerbils and the Falklands War belongs to Mrs Thatcher. I'm making no profit from any of them.

* * *

Smoke

It was hot in the car. They'd been stuck in traffic jams for an hour now, slowly picking their way through the city centre. Hal was happy enough doing research and scanning through the news feeds with his radio and laptop computer, but David's temper was beginning to fray. "I thought hardly anyone in China had a car!" he snapped.

"There's over twenty six million cars in China," replied Hal, mildly. "Do you want some water?"

"No, I don't want some water! I want you to find a lead!"

"You should calm down. We're not racing against the clock here."

This drove the soldier into an incoherent rage, and he spent the next ten minutes constructing elaborate swearwords and directing them with great venom at the heat, the dust, the traffic, the heat, his partner, the mission and the heat.

There was a moment of silence. Hal started to speak, but David snapped, "Unless your next word is 'Hey, I know where we're going', it's gonna be 'ouch'."

The programmer gave a long-suffering sigh, and adjusted his glasses. "I don't think you appreciate me. And I don't think you should let the heat get to you so much. And I do happen to have several potential sites lined up." He resumed typing, ignoring his partner's teeth-grinding. "Are you still jumpy about the launch?"

"The hell are you talking about, jumpy about the launch? I thought I saw world war three kick off, yeah, that startled me a little. I'm over it. Don't psychoanalyse me. You know I hate that." He took the handbrake off, and the car juddered forward another few feet. "I appreciate you."

Hal made a disbelieving noise. "What do you appreciate about me?"

"I." He eyed the man in the seat beside him. "Like your haircut."

"You did that yourself!" He glanced self-consciously in the dusty wing mirror. It was shorter than he was used to, but didn't look too bad. It was certainly a lot neater. "Besides, that just doesn't count. Try again."

"Is this really the time?"

"Stuck in a traffic jam while on a mission with a reasonable chance of getting us both killed? I'd say it was the perfect time for you to express your true feelings to me."

"I feel that you're acting like a little girl."

"A girl wouldn't be gullible enough to put up with you and your moods and your paranoia and your vague, unsubstantiated threats," retorted Hal.

"You are pretty gullible," agreed Dave. "Which way do we go at the next intersection?"

"I'm not going to tell you. We're still ten minutes away from it, and if you know where we're supposed to be going, you'll start twitching and snarling and revving the engine, and that's really bad for fuel economy." He stared out of the window at the crowded streets. "I thought you were supposed to have incredible levels of endurance? How on earth did you make it through Mongolia?"

"I mostly travelled at night."

"What was it like?"

David optimistically changed gear, only to frustrate himself a few moments later when the column of cars ground to a halt and he had to slam the handbrake on again. "What was what like?" he asked, shortly.

Hal was still staring out of the open window at the people rushing past on bicycles or on foot, gazing up at the hazy blue sky. "Walking that far all by yourself."

"I'm used to being by myself." The man shifted in the seat, feeling sticky. His partner was looking at him, as if he expected him to go on. "There was... sand, and thorn bushes, and scorpions. And weird bugs. Like everything that lives out there is made out of spikes." He cleared his throat, and reached up to scratch at the back of his neck. "It'd get bright a long time before the sun rose. There only seemed to be about four hours of real darkness every night. You could see clearly in the palest light, and it would slowly get brighter and less grey, and the sand would start to turn red and orange, and the sun would appear over the horizon. Straight away, it'd feel hot, and I'd start looking for a place to hole up."

"It sounds as if nobody could live there."

"Yep. Which way are we going at this intersection?"

"Straight on." He yawned and stretched, under the seat belt and his laptop. "I think you're..." He paused, caught between saying 'amazing' and 'crazy'. "I couldn't have done it."

"Yeah, well. I couldn't have tricked all those people. That was pretty impressive."

The spike of guilt jabbed into Hal's conscience again. "D'you think Mr Wong and the guards got in trouble for letting me in?"

David cautiously eyed the man beside him. As far as the soldier was concerned, anybody who escaped an encounter with agents of Philanthropy with their life was doing unexpectedly well. "Who's Mr Wong?"

"My contact. The man who met me at the airport."

"You getting a moral crisis over some foreign scientists developing Metal Gears?"

He just looked uncomfortable. "No! They were just, y'know... nice people. It wasn't their fault. I didn't want to cause them any trouble."

"Oh." The traffic thinned out, and he managed to accelerate to thirty miles an hour. "They'll be fine. The scientists aren't trained to detect that kinda subterfuge, and they're too valuable to kill in a fit of temper. And the guards are right at the bottom of the chain of command. The blame'll probably get lost on its way up. Tell me where we're going."

Hal gave him directions. He ran his fingers through his short hair as he gazed out of the window, not looking reassured.

"What? What's wrong?" David asked.

"Nothing..."

"People probably get in a lot more trouble when you skip in and out of their computer systems."

"Yeah, but..."

"You feel like they deserve that because their security is so sloppy. It's the same thing, Hal. If they get sacked or imprisoned or killed or whatever, they should have done their job better." Thumping the steering wheel, Dave drove his point home. "Every guard I shoot should have been more alert. When it comes down to it, it's you or them, and you can't afford to feel guilty about survival."

The programmer looked down, chewing his bottom lip. "That's just. I mean. Maybe that's true for you, but I'm just collecting data. And you don't go in dressed as one of their soldiers."

"Hal! It's not that simple. This isn't like Indiana Jones. They don't just speak English with a comical Chinese accent, and say 'ah so!' a lot. And guards don't just wander at will over the whole damn compound. Someone sees me heading for the launch pad and sends a sharp query, I answer with 'Uhh, wo bu hui shuo Hanyu', the whole mission is screwed up and they're searching for us a whole lot harder then they are now." He glanced over at the map on Hal's computer screen. "I had the stealth cammo. That's even worse, right?"

"You had the stealth cammo?"

"Hell, yeah. I could see from the maps that the place was a sneaking nightmare."

"But they shot you."

"Y'know, the ability to look like a moving man-shaped mirror doesn't repel bullets. In many circumstances, it attracts them."

"But we'll have to go through airport security to leave."

"Gonna post it back home."

"Oh, good idea." They were going fast enough to have a stiff breeze coming in through the windows. Hal shoved everything that might fly away down by his feet, and resumed picking through news feeds and satellite images. He made an unhappy noise. "I think they've really tightened security on all their Metal Gear sites. The nearest place that had significant troop movements last night is five hundred kilometres away. I think we can make it there by tonight, if you don't mind camping out."

"Fine by me. How many troops?"

"A lot. Like, hundreds."

"What?"

"All I've got is one blurry photo of a lot of trucks headed for the area. The intelligence I can offer you is limited." David muttered something about knowing that already under his breath, but Hal ignored him. "If you can find a computer and plug me in, though, I should be able to help you out when you're there."

They drove on in silence a while. The traffic didn't slow them down again, and soon they were leaving the city. Hal's internet connection abruptly failed, and he settled down to analyse the data he already had. Dave took out a cigarette and lit it, feeling the pull and ache in his injured arm, estimating how much it would set him back, what allowances he'd have to make. An hour later they stopped in a town for supplies, assisted by the phrasebook on the laptop.

Back on the road, Hal took over the driving. Without the distraction of his computer, he couldn't help saying what was on his mind. "It's not going to help, though, is it? Not unless we can find out where they came from."

"Are you certain they weren't manufactured here? I've never seen a Metal Gear like the one I saw yesterday." The spectre of the vast, black monster, like an oil slick in bipedal form, still loomed large in his memory.

But Hal shook his head. "The plans may have been released, but the operating system is still a highly specialised piece of equipment. I don't doubt that China is designing its own OS, but for the moment they're using an American import."

"Jesus, I don't know. The only bastard I can think of who'd do a thing like that is Revolver Ocelot, and we're pretty damn sure he's not involved."

Even as he said the words, an icy finger poked him in the chest. He and Hal exchanged a look.

"I mean," he said, staring fixedly at the road in front of them. "What would he be doing in China, right?"

"Right," replied his partner. "Yeah. No, that's a crazy idea." He laughed nervously. "It's not like there are only half a dozen people on the world stage, right? It was probably someone we've never heard of before."

"Right," agreed Dave, sounding relieved. "Yeah, you're right. Paranoia getting the better of me." He grinned, and leaned back in the passenger seat. "Alright. On with the mission, Otacon. To the base."

* * *

Under the cover of rapidly failing light and his battered camouflage gear, Snake made his way to the nameless, apparently empty square of land where a large portion of China's next-generation military hardware was supposed to be stored. He was wearing his night vision goggles, brought all the way from America in their shock-proof, sand-proof box, because he just knew something like this would kick off. There was no such thing as being too prepared. Otacon was stationed with the parked car, ten kilometres away, awaiting Snake's signal or return. The environmental conditions were substantially more verdant than Jiuquan had been, farmers' fields giving way to long grass that rustled in the breeze as he drew closer to the target. Nothing unusual had marked the area out on the aerial photograph – just a patch of rough, broken ground, surrounded by rusty rolls of barbed wire, which he was now picking his way over.

He could make out something a few tens of metres in front of him, a hulking block of shadow against the falling darkness. The wind picked up momentarily, and there was the flap of cloth over the sussurus of the swaying grass. It also bought him the sounds of an approaching, whispered conversation. Snake took his time to step back and silently sink to the ground, invisible against the undergrowth, as the guards drew nearer.

The two young men passed by close enough for him to hear every hissed word, but he couldn't understand a thing. He could tell they were efficient and alert, though; they kept to the mown grass of the compound so their own footsteps wouldn't hide any suspicious activity, gaze tirelessly sweeping left and right in a constant search pattern, not slacking off for a cigarette behind the shed or whatever it was. In a moment they were gone, and Snake waited until they were out of sight and hearing before getting to his feet and resuming his cautious reconnaissance.

It seemed that the dark block wasn't a building, unless someone had decided to cover an outhouse in a huge square of khaki tarpaulin. He raised a corner of the waxy sheet, and his night vision goggles seemed to inform that there was exactly nothing underneath it. He pulled them off, and stared at the solid slab of empty shadow.

Footsteps. Another pair of guards on patrol. Otacon hadn't been underestimating troop numbers. Without hesitation, he slipped under the cloth and pressed his back to the surface of the alien robot behind him. The curved metal wall seemed to be vibrating, very softly and distantly. Where his fingers touched it, the naked skin seemed to tingle. It was warm. Of course it was warm. It had been standing under the sun all day. He ached to use the codec to call his partner, but he couldn't without first finding a suitable computer to plug Otacon's magic gadgets into. It still wasn't clear what had given away his presence last time, maybe something as simple as not noticing being spotted in the chaos of the launch, but if there was a way to avoid being shot again, he was keen to take it. And ten kilometres would be a stretch for their satellite-free burst transmission. There had to be a computer somewhere. He had to wait.

Too easy to imagine the unshielded signals of the codec waking the machine behind him, the narrow, thorn-shaped head swinging around, searchlights flaring as the chitinous limbs propelled it upwards. A bead of sweat formed, and ran down the side of his face. He let it. He could be afraid and calm at the same time. He had to wait.

As soon as the guards had gone, Snake replaced his goggles and slunk away, feeling the coolness of the night air and the dry grass under his hands with a new intensity.

Snake had no map and no guide, but a hundred guards would need to eat and sleep somewhere. Moving rapidly through the darkness, lingering beside the hunched shapes of the Metal Gears as patrols marched past, he worked his way methodically across the compound. His goal appeared in the form of several long, low tents occupying a flattened patch of ground in the centre of the camp. Places where grass had been worn down to the earth indicated which canvas shelters were permanent structures, and which had been hastily erected to hold the reinforcements. All of them were camouflaged with poles and netting.

There. A semi-permanent command post, a canvas shelter with only one wall, home to an officer in a khaki deck chair, two soldiers and a computer sitting on a folding desk. He dug his hand into one of his many pockets and drew out a pebble, one of a handful picked up during his earlier hike, then hurled it as hard as he could into the darkness. It hit a Metal Gear with a dull clunk, and the soldiers on guard jolted to full alertness. Another pebble, further to the left, away from the tent. At an order from their commander, they left. Snake upholstered his silenced M9 and shot the officer, then turned the computer on and the monitor off and plugged the gadget into a slot on the back. After removing the tranquilliser dart from the man's neck, he retreated a hundred metres back into the darkness and tried the codec.

"Nice work, Snake!" Otacon answered immediately, and sounded excited. "The satellite uplink is just taking a second, then we'll finally be able to see what's going on. So I guess that if you found a computer, that means there is something there after all? Are you underground again?"

"Nope. There's gotta be twenty Metal Gears here, just sitting around. Makes my skin crawl."

"What? They must have some kind of experimental field generator camouflaging them from view! Can you see any Tesla coils?"

"Tesla coils? Otacon, they've thrown tarps and netting over them."

"Whu? You can't-"

"Well known tactic. During the Falklands war, the Argentinian troops heaped dirt and rubble onto the airfields. From the air, it looked like they'd already been bombed. Once the enemy finishes their reconnaissance run, bulldoze the rubble off, and your runways are ready to go."

Otacon gave a long, low whistle. "Negative obstacles, huh? Didn't think of that. I guess neither of us is a specialist in this field."

"It's worse than that. The Metal Gears are all hunched up. It's hard to tell what they are, even down on the ground."

"Hunched up?"

"Yeah."

"Never mind, the feed's come through. Oh... huh. Wow."

There was a commotion in the general area of the encampment. Snake slunk further into the shadows, letting patrols run past him. Swinging torch beams threatened to reveal his position, and he listened to Otacon muttering to himself about the limitations of satellite imagery as he silently edged around his cover to avoid them. "You almost done? It's getting real warm around here."

"I'm sure you can manage, Snake. I'm gonna need another twenty minutes at least. Can you get closer to the hub?"

"Jesus, Otacon."

"Can't you hide under some of that camouflage netting?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because." He timed his sprint to the hulking shadow of the next Metal Gear. They were bad enough covered. He didn't like the idea of snuggling up next to one when the camp was on full alert and they might lurch into mechanical life at any moment. "How's that?"

"Good. I'm gonna get this done as fast as I can. Hold on, okay?"

He turned the codec off. Playing cat-and-mouse with hundreds of Chinese soldiers on full alert would make for a long twenty minutes. At least Hal was somewhere safe, and it was pitch black out here, and there was some goddamn _cover_. It beat the Jiuquan mission to hell for survivability. Even the constant patrols were working for him, the noise they were making and the grass they were crushing under their feet very effectively covering his presence.

"Oh, nuts," said Otacon, suddenly.

"What's happening?"

"They've found me. Okay, I thought this might happen. I can't risk the laptop, so I've just pulled off everything I could to look at later. If you can get the gizmo back, we can get out of here."

"Get it back."

"Well, yeah. I can't just make another, and we'll probably need it again."

The command post was like an ants nest that had been stirred with a stick. Soldiers ran hither and thither, yelling in Chinese. Every light was blazing. Snake scratched his chin.

"Right," he said. "Gimmie a minute."


	5. Chapter 5

All mercenaries, hackers and giant flesh-eating robots belong to their respective owners. The 200 mute ninja are mine, though. Read my other story, you'll like it!

* * *

Smoke

The minutes ticked past, unmarked by Otacon. His fingers were flying over the keyboard, searching through the data he'd pulled off the system before he had to shut down the link. Way too much of it was showing up as characters he couldn't read, and although he could run it through a translator there was still more ambiguity than he liked.

He skimmed across page after page, names and dates and maps all being stored in his mind for future reference, then encrypted and compressed into his computer's memory. It was a rush job, and he was nervous about the logograms getting corrupted, but he couldn't handle the risk of toting the laptop around with any raw data on it. Even the codex wouldn't stay on there once he was done, instead being wirelessly transmitted to the nanomachines presently wandering around his circulatory system so that the original could be destroyed.

Still, even if they could only use the parts he'd already seen, there was more than enough here. Names of scientists and military officers. Locations of other sites like this one. Technical specifications.

The technical specifications were _interesting_. No wonder he hadn't been able to see the things from the spy photographs. These things ought to be more or less invisible in the dark. Their heat signature was supposed to be practically nil while they were moving in stealth mode. There was nothing especially revolutionary about the adaptations, but it frightened him to think that Metal Gear technology had become as ubiquitous as fighter aircraft or tanks. Or maybe it signified a new shift in global trends towards hidden force, its presence suggested at only by a few oblique, terrifying hints.

His techno-emo musings were interrupted by the passenger door being yanked open. "Drive!" Yelled Snake, slamming it shut again. "Drive drive drive! Fucking drive!"

Otacon hurried to obey, shutting his laptop and sliding it into the foot well. Then he heard a gentle creaking of metal in the darkness beyond the windscreen and caught sight of a faint glimmer of light on glass. There was something huge and silent out there, and it was about to strike. He lunged for the ignition, wrenched the gearbox into reverse, and stamped on the accelerator.

Snake was standing up and leaning out of the window as they hurtled backwards, bracing his knee against the dashboard to take aim with an RPG he'd been keeping on the back seat. There was a whoosh sound and an explosion, and a fireball blossomed a few metres away from the front of the car, casting a brief, searing illumination across a landscape of hellish, flailing shadows.

The car screeched around, Snake still hanging out of the window, and Otacon headed for the road, grinding his back teeth together and silently screaming at the car to go faster. Two more rockets found their mark and there was a series of explosions and a cacophony of tearing metal behind them as precision engineering finally failed. "Don't slow down!" Snake shouted, pulling himself and the unwieldy weapon back into the vehicle. "There's more out there!"

Otacon didn't have to be told twice. He turned the lights on, found the road and kept accelerating, his knuckles white as his hands tightened on the wheel. "What happened?!"

"Got your magic box," panted Snake.

"You alright?"

"Just fine." He stuck his head out of the window again, then turned back to his partner. "They're still following. Don't think we can outrun them. Don't suppose you dug up any info we could use right about now?"

Otacon tried to marshal his thoughts, which were still hiding behind things and screaming. If he'd seen the Metal Gear's top walking speed in the tech specs, he couldn't remember it. On the other hand, it was easy to visualise its silent, springing lope bringing it closer every second, a spiked black claw landing in the centre of the roof, buckling the fragile metal shell around them, tearing the car apart and devouring the fleshy humans within. He shook his head, and tried to stop thinking of Neon Genesis Evangelion. "I don't think so. Got any more rockets?"

"Not enough." There weren't enough rockets in the _world_. Snake sat still, breathing hard, trying to think up a plan. "Alright. We have to bail out. While the Metal Gears tear the car apart, we get under some cover and hide."

"What! We're going at-" He glanced at the speedometer "- Nearly fifty miles an hour? Next time, _I'm_ choosing the car-"

"Get your computer!" Snake slid up beside Otacon, taking the steering wheel and accelerator. He yanked it left, and took his foot off the pedal. The car went into an uncontrolled spin, pinning them down together. The vehicle flipped crazily. It was like being on a fairground ride. All he could feel was Hal crushed underneath him, his arms around the man, and it was like being teenagers, like this was supposed to be happening.

They slid to a halt upside down in a ditch, and dragged each other out through the broken windscreen, scrambling and crawling blindly through freezing muddy water and torn vegetation. Struggling away from the upturned car, they didn't see it suddenly impaled and ripped apart. At the scream of torn metal, Snake pushed Otacon down, turned around, and raised the RPG he still clung to with grazed hands. He fired at the car, the only clear target. As the hapless Toyota's engine exploded, it provided enough orange, flickering illumination for him to blast away at the semi-visible walking tanks.

Otacon crouched a few feet away, the laptop clutched to his chest to keep it away from the water presently seeping through the knees of his jeans. He shut his eyes, his chin on his chest as things detonated metres away from him. Sometimes, all you could do was obey the instinct to make yourself small. There was no point in running. The Metal Gear's infra-red vision would spot him in a second, especially if he left his present refuge of soaking leaves.

He could imagine that he could hear Snake's harsh, steady breathing as the man relentlessly attacked their pursuers. He felt almost calm, if you didn't count the two hundred and fifty beats per minute heart rate.

The firing stopped, leaving only the background rain-crackle of raging flames. He opened his eyes, and found he was in a petrified forest of black columns. When their pilots were killed, the machines simply froze into their last position, limbs eternally contorted into rigor-mortis statues. Snake stood in front of him, wreathed in thick grey smoke, covered in twinkling shards of broken glass and flecks of blood, his chest heaving. He threw the empty, smoking tube of the RPG into the conflagration, and held his hand out to his partner.

"Come on," said Snake, gruffly. "You get anything useful on that computer?"

"Lots," replied Otacon, pulling himself to his feet. "we have to-"

"You're limping," interrupted Snake.

He looked down. Everything was still numb and tingly from adrenaline. "I must've twisted my ankle in the crash..."

"You and your weak ankles." Snake took the laptop from his partner, bent over and scooped the man onto his shoulder. Without a pause, he started jogging away from the battlefield behind them.

Otacon managed to grab his glasses before they fell off. "Hey! I can walk!"

"We don't have time to mess around. They could already be scrambling more units. Either way, we're screwed. We've gotta get out of the country." In one sense the skinny programmer didn't weigh very much, but in another, more real one, he weighed a frigging ton. Snake was aware he was now operating on some sort of meta-energy, fuelled largely by willpower. He just wanted to put as much distance between himself and the people trying to kill him as humanly possible.

"How are we going leave China?" Otacon asked. Hanging upside down over someone's shoulder as they ran through a dark wood had never been an impediment to clear thinking for him. It reminded him of college. "I've still got the passports I made, but airports are one of the easiest places to watch. The Metal Gears must have gotten pictures of us, as if we weren't conspicuous enough already."

"Can you contact the girls?"

"Not from here. If we got to a city, then maybe. They've made themselves hard to find."

Both men fell silent. Very occasionally, a car drove past them, screened from sight by the hedge of trees. Undergrowth crunched beneath Snake's boots. The pre-dawn chill was in the air, and even the insects were quiet.

"They run on computers, right? Couldn't you create some kinda computer virus?"

"With that tiny laptop, and the few programs I dared squeeze past all the security? I couldn't even slow them down."

Snake trudged on as birds began to tweet and the traffic picked up, signifying the break of dawn.

"Hey," said Otacon, after a few more minutes of being bounced uncomfortably along on his partner's back. "I think you can stop carrying me now."

"But..."

"Seriously, I don't think we're being followed. Plus, it's getting hard to breathe like this."

Reluctantly, Snake put the man down. "How's your leg?"

"It's fine." His jeans were streaked with rust-coloured dried blood, but he could put his weight on it, and he didn't look any worse than the man in the slightly charred sneaking suit. "What's that on your face?"

"Burn from the RPG. Must have pressed up against the tube while we were driving." He touched it with a grimace. "We're not gonna get anywhere like this. Don't suppose you know how far it is to the nearest town?"

"Well, sure I do. We drove this way when we came here, remember? We can't be more than a couple of miles away now." Suddenly, Snake grabbed him and dragged him to the ground. "What?! What's happening?"

"Police car. They've been driving up and down all night. Now it's light, we're gonna have to watch out."

Otacon put his head in his hands and sighed. "This has gone really wrong, hasn't it?"

"Huh?"

"I thought there'd be one Metal Gear that we could take out with a lightning assault. I thought you'd destroy it and we'd be back home yesterday. They're not _supposed_ to be mass-produced."

"I know what you mean," admitted the soldier, sitting down beside his partner. "On the one hand, it makes sense. If any country had the heavy industries and manpower to mass-produce Metal Gears, it'd be China. On the other... this is _really_ messed up."

He took his glasses off and rubbed at his eyes. "So now we're sitting in a ditch with a hard-drive full of sensitive information, hostiles homing in on our position, a long walk into town and God, I'm hungry."

Snake rummaged in a pocket of his suit. "Want a smoke?"

"What? No!"

"Curbs your appetite."

"Oh, Snake! That's just a myth perpetuated by tobacco manufacturers to teenage girls."

"A myth? No, it's not! Why'd you think soldiers smoke? Cigs are lighter than rations. Good barter material, too. And it's something you know you have in common with everybody else. You run into an enemy patrol in Butt Fuck, Egypt, you don't speak the language, there's shouting, general unpleasantness is threatened. Offer 'em a smoke, and you're sitting around discussing their uncles' goats like you've known each other all your life."

"That's such a load of bullshit, you've never been to Egypt."

"It's a figure of-" There was the sound of a car pulling to a halt a few metres away from their location, and Snake froze. He made a sharp gesture towards Otacon for silence, that he should get lower to the ground. Stealthily, he reached for the M9 at his hip.

Someone was walking towards them. They were holding a cardboard sign that read, "Do you need a hand?"


	6. Chapter 6

Smoke

The two girls in the back seat of the five-door hatchback squashed up to let the two men into the car. They were still identical, but their red hair had grown long enough to be brushed, and they were all dressed differently, so the effect was a lot less unsettling than the last time they'd met. Snake expected his knees to be around his chin when he sat down, but the girl in the front passenger seat shifted it forward to give them more legroom.

"Oh, my God." said Otacon. "How the hell did you find us? Snake wouldn't let me tell you anything except that we were thinking of heading out! You couldn't have followed the paper trail. I mean, I covered our tracks in every manner I could conceivably wring out of the resources I had! And I mean, considering budget and space constraints, I had a pretty good set-up going on. You _can't_ have spoken to the pilot, because he didn't know anything, and I ran checks on him twelve ways to Tuesday. Even if you hacked into the Chinese government security databases, you'd be covered in police around about now. And what are you even doing here? I thought you were all running the mink zoo in Norway! Driver said you were still considering your stance on nuclear proliferation. Have you decided to help us?"

"Otacon, give 'em a minute to answer, they've gotta write all this stuff down."

After a moment, one of the girls handed him their mobile phone. "Thought we warned you. You're being watched. If you can't use wire-2-wire, don't touch it. You're sending up beacons."

"We can give you a lift to Oslo. From there, we strongly advise you travel to England."

Snake looked up from the screen. "England? What the hell?"

"We need to get back to the US," explained Otacon. "I picked off a heap of really hot data from the camp, and we need to act on it before they change everything." He would have said more, but the girls had started typing out responses. This really was a laborious way to hold a conversation.

"You haven't seen the response to the destroyed satellite, have you?"

"Not as such." He hadn't had the time or the access points to find some unfiltered data of the worldwide reaction to China's unbridled aggression. "I assume it was pretty extreme. The UN must have had a fit. They've got to be arguing over the orbital treaties as we speak."

"There has been no reaction."

Otacon blinked, and stared at the message. "No, well, I don't just mean an escalation of global aggression and NATO sanctions against China. It's only been a couple of days, they're probably still working those out. Regular citizens must have seen what happened, it's hard to clamp down on something that happens fifty kilometres above the earth. There must have been an uproar." He glanced at Snake, who was staring out of the window and shaking his head. "Right?"

A girl leaned over and flicked the mobile phone in his hand to reiterate the point.

"That's crazy! You must not have been looking in the right places. Snake, back me up here. There's no way something like this could happen with no outcry whatsoever."

"If anyone gave a fuck, would we be doing this by ourselves?"

"But, but-!"

"Look," said Snake, as kindly as he could. "Maybe the Patriots have covered the whole thing up. Maybe the common populace is so sick of endless nuclear menace they can do nothing about, they just stopped caring. It's not the nineteen-sixties any more. Forty years of intellectual oppression disguised as freedom could knock the hell-raisers out of any society. Maybe the constant slew of paranoia and terrorism from the television and internet has numbed Joe Public to the horror of war, and only the direct threat of their imminent death would stir them to action. Maybe not even then. Either way, nations are re-starting their nuclear power station programs, celebrities are adopting children from third-world countries and more people vote for American Idol than the next president."

"What are you saying?" Asked Otacon, in genuine confusion.

"I'm saying there is no voice of sanity."

"Well, jeez, Snake, I know that."

The girl in the front passenger seat leaned around, offering the others a paper bag, transparent with grease, containing meat-filled buns. They were still warm. Otacon showed as much polite restraint as he could while stuffing himself with sandwiches.

"These are great," he said with his mouth full. "What are they?"

"Hoi sin mink."

He choked and dropped the phone.

"It's pork, Otacon. They're pork buns." He glared at the girl in the front seat, who innocently munched her snack and offered him a can of drink. "So you had time to stock up on supplies before rushing to our aid, huh?"

She rubbed her fingers together, pointed to her phone and shrugged, evidently signalling that sticky hands rendered her incommunicado.

"It's pork," Snake reassured his partner as he opened his can. "Hey, this is coffee. Give him one."

They drove past a town, finishing off the greasy buns. Front-seat girl handed out moist towelettes, and the conversation resumed.

"So what are we supposed to go to England for?" Asked the soldier. "And can you narrow down our destination? I know it's a little place, but I don't wanna have to search the whole country for more mysterious clues."

The girl wedged against the left rear door started typing out a response, while her comrade reached over her lap and took a bag of milk chews from the magazine pocket. It looked like it was going to be a long message. They passed around the sweets and drank more iced coffee while they waited.

"There's a new kind of Metal Gear," came the reply, eventually. "You will have noticed that much of the OS data is in English. That's not because it's from America, it's because it was made in England (gasp, dramatic pause). A faction of influential businessmen and scientists have become exasperated with the political regime and, using black market Metal Gear technology, have made a proposal that the PRC found most appealing. If the businessmen could continue making money, China could annex the UK. To this end, they've been preparing for the coup d'etat."

"What?" Otacon scrolled up and down the glowing screen, re-reading the message in the hope that it would start to make sense. "That's insane. Who invites an oppressive authoritarian state with a dubious human rights record to run their country in return for more money?"

"Someone sick of red tape and excuses," came the phone-typed response. "Or a deranged idealist who's lost faith in the political system of their own country, take your pick."

"Well, I hardly think there would be less red tape if the communists were in charge."

"Less than that generated by 14 separate sub-divisions of local government?"

Otacon looked up at the girl who'd handed him the phone, his brows furrowed. "I can't tell if you're for this or against it."

"I think they're against trading laws, but more against China muscling in on their territory." Snake looked up, gave the girls a narrow-eyed glare. "How'd you find out about this, anyway? They ask you to join in?"

"We're not UK based, and we make way too much money. The people behind this are earning 15 mill p.a., max."

The glare intensified. "And you're earning all that in a socially responsible way, huh?"

They offered the men more milk chews. "We found out about it through a network of contacts and a little careful digging," came the mobile-phone borne response. "Something was happening amongst the little-big-fry, and we investigated from there."

Another phone read: "Socially responsible is such a hard-to-get-certified word."

"Anyway, we're really grateful for your help," said Otacon. Now that he wasn't hungry, thirsty, cold or in immediate peril, he was getting tired. He took his glasses off and rubbed his face again. "'Cause, you know. I'm sure we'd have been fine, but."

"They say you should get some sleep." Snake read out the message on the screen for him. "It's still a few hours to the airport." His own eyes were getting heavy, too. Something about being jammed in the back of a car with the clone-girls was very soporific. They hardly reacted to tranquillisers, he remembered. Could've put enough in the food to knock two exhausted men out without even endangering their own ability to drive. Whatever. He couldn't bring himself to worry about it. He yawned, put his head on Hal's shoulder and fell asleep.

* * *

"Hey, wake up."

"Mmph." Snake realised he was curled up awkwardly on the back seat, drooling onto Otacon's grass-stained jeans. He pushed himself into a more upright position, eyes darting foggily around. "Bitches tranqued us?"

Otacon's speech-recognition software decoded his partners' sleep-slurred question. "No, I don't think so. No headache." He rubbed absently at the damp patch on his thigh. "Don't call them that, okay?"

The soldier muttered a collection of consonants, groping around on the floor for his bandanna, which had fallen off. He felt muzzy and vulnerable, and blamed the clone-girls entirely for this. He also needed to piss, which he was prepared to accept some responsibility for. Pushing the door open and stumbling out of the car, he realised they were in an airport car park. "I hope they've got a better plan than last time," he said, looking up to watch the white underbelly of a 747 as it came in to land. "I think it'll take more than four of them to pull off the same trick again."

"You don't like them, do you?" Otacon asked, getting out of the vehicle and stretching.

"They're plenty likeable, I just don't trust them." Snake shook his hair out of his eyes and re-tied the long strip of faded blue cloth around his head. "How old are they, fifteen? Child soldiers I can understand, but what's motivating the girls to carry on doing whatever they're doing? And what are they saving all that money for? I never saw anybody amass a vast fortune for anything other than a nefarious purpose."

Leaning on the roof of the car, the programmer sighed. "Maybe it's some complex revenge plot against the people who made them. Maybe it's just superior genes driving them on. Or maybe they're just a lot more concerned with humanitarian affairs then you think they are."

"I'm pretty sure they don't even view themselves as human, Otacon." He caught sight of the other man's startled expression, and shrugged awkwardly. "You know what I mean."

"No, I think you're jealous that they all get on with each other, while the same _planet_ wasn't big enough for you and your clone."

"_What_ did you just say?" Otacon smirked, and adjusted his glasses. Snake growled and pounced around the car at him, and the engineer fled. He got a good ten metres before the legendary mercenary dragged him down to the asphalt surface of the car park.

"This just proves my point!" Yelled Otacon, flailing madly against his captor. "You wanted telepathic incest with Liquid!"

Snake was laughing, but only as he knelt on the man and punched him in the chest. "I think you should shut up now."

"Wait. Between clones, is it incest or masturbation?"

"That's _it_-"

There was a high-pitched whistle behind them. The four clones were standing by the car. One was holding a hastily-lettered sign that read, "Which of you is the girl?" The others followed Snake and Otacon's bemused, startled gazes towards it, and yanked it from her. There was a rapid, spirited argument in sign language, and the two men used the pause as an opportunity to get up. The dispute appeared to conclude amicably, although the sign was destroyed in the process, and they started off towards the airport terminal with a gesture that the others should accompany them.

"Wait." Snake jogged to draw level with them. "Otacon's covered in blood, and I've got a gun. You don't anticipate any problems with this?"

They shook their heads, and led the pair through the concourse, past the security checkpoints, and out onto the airstrip, where they boarded a Hercules aircraft full of caged ferrets that squeaked and chewed at the wire bars. They squeezed past the stacks of crates, running a gauntlet of madly excited animals, and prepared themselves for take off. Two girls stayed with their live cargo of future fur coats, while the other two retreated to the cockpit. Twenty minutes later they were in the air with no problems, except for the crazed ferrets.

One of the girls approached Otacon and went into a complex series of gestures, pawing the air, waving her hands in front of her face, pointing to her mouth, rubbing her stomach and finally indicating that he should take his trousers off. She then handed him a zipped-up bag with a red cross on it.

"Um," said Otacon.

Snake translated. "She says the animals are hungry, and the smell of blood is driving 'em nuts, so get your pants off and clean yourself up."

"Are you kidding?" He cried. "There must be seven hundred ferrets in here. There's no way they could smell me over each other." He lowered his voice. "And I'm not sure that this isn't just an attempt to find out which one of us is the girl."

"Just take your pants off, Otacon."

"You're on their side?!"

"After that wisecrack about clones? If it was up to me, I'd toss you in there with them."

He inspected the creatures in a nearby cage. They were small, tube-shaped animals with long tails, raccoon-marked faces and little round ears. If it wasn't for all the thrashing and squeaking, they'd almost be cuddly. "I don't know, I could live with that. They're pretty cute."

"A pack of weasels this size could strip a man to the bones in twenty minutes of frenzied nibbling," Snake told him sternly, his face grave. "Then they eat the bones."

"Oh come on, Snake, they look like stretched teddy bears." He looked up as a girl passed them, dragging a large plastic sack. She opened a hatch on an enclosure and tossed in handfuls of little yellow dead birds. The animals fell on them with excited, high-pitched chirps, tearing them to tatters of down.

With no further argument, Otacon removed his jeans. The girl not occupied with feeding the ferrets took them from him. He half expected her to throw them into the cages, but instead she went and left them in the bathroom. After he'd scrubbed the dried blood from his legs with wet cotton wool, the creatures did appear less agitated. By way of contrast, Snake had gotten up and started pacing up and down the narrow gangway in the centre of the cargo bay.

It was either because he needed a cigarette or something was worrying him

"You okay?" Called Otacon.

The man cast him a dubious look and, rather than shout over the sound of the engines and the caged animals, went over and sat down beside his partner. He took out his cigarettes and started absent-mindedly playing with the box, confirming at least one of Otacon's suspicions. "Hey. Do you think we're doing the right thing?"

He blinked in surprise. "Well. Yes?"

"You don't sound sure."

"I don't understand what you're asking. I think it's right that we destroy Metal Gears and try to limit their spread."

"But Metal Gears were developed to give the USA an unmatchable military advantage over any other country, tipping the balance of world power forever. If the UK and PRC and Christ knows where else has 'em, isn't that just another way to even things up?"

"Hmm." Otacon took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt, more out of habit than any serious attempt to clean them on the stained, sweaty fabric. He gave Snake an earnest, searching, if blurringly myopic, look. "Look at it this way. Imagine you've just worked out the general theory of relativity. The next thing you know, an international team of scientists are busy turning your equation into weapons of unprecedented destructive power. Now, if you knew that the bureaucrats in charge of the project were lying to you, and these weapons wouldn't end all war and suffering but instead endlessly perpetuate it, wouldn't you try and do something about it?" He replaced his smeary spectacles. "What I'm saying is, right is a relative term and I'm going to do this anyway."

"Metal Gear isn't your fault. You had a hand in creating Rex, that's all." Snake started playing with the box again, flipping the lid open and closed. "If any one man is responsible for Metal Gear, it's Big Boss, and-" He was going to say, I killed him already, but he didn't want Otacon to get any funny ideas. "And not you."

The engineer waved his hands in the air. "Okay, fine. Are you seriously telling me that you're prepared to sit back and watch this happen?"

"I didn't say that. Just thinking about whether it'll help in the long run."

"I think it'll help more than nuclear war between two nations of giant robots."

Snake raised an eyebrow. "You watch too much animé, but that point _is_ hard to argue with."

"Thank you." Otacon drew his legs under him on the webbing bench. "It's _freezing_ in here."

"Ten degrees C at least." He put his arm around the skinny man.

"You don't radiate a lot of heat when you're wearing your sneaking suit." Despite this, Otacon made no attempt to move away from him.

"I can't take it off. The girls'll think I'm some kinda aircraft-fetishist pervert."

"Yeah." He slid his hand up Snake's back, his fingers finding the knot of the mercenaries' bandana and tugging softly at it. "Maybe you should try and sleep some more. It'll take us hours to reach Oslo, and there's another plane trip after that."

"Good thinking." Snake stretched out on the net hammock of the bench. "What're you gonna do?"

Otacon waved at his laptop. "Maybe huddle against you for warmth, too. It depends where the power outlet is."

The soldier shut his eyes, either trying to sleep, or deep in thought, or both. Feeling somewhat foolish, Otacon slipped his trainers on and stood up. In the sudden chill, the now-sated ferrets mostly seemed to be dozing in the straw bedding of their crates, and their keepers were touring the cabin, checking on their charges. The man cleared his throat nervously as he approached them.

"Uh, is there anywhere I could plug this in?" He asked, holding up the computer's power cord.

To his great alarm, one of them calmly reached over and took the laptop from him.

"Um, wait, no, I... I, I trust you and everything, but that's got some very..."

The other girl took Otacon's wrist and dragged him away as politely as possible, her small size belying her immense strength. As she guided him to the back of the aircraft, well away from where her comrade did unknown things to his precious computer, his tenuous link to the one thing he could do that would help Snake, she was typing a message on her mobile phone.

"So you're male," it read.

* * *

As the Oslo to Bristol flight took off, Snake arched his back in an attempt to stretch. "Christ, eight hours in a Hercules is too long with any amount of ferrets. At least this one won't take so long, huh? You don't notice how fast a conversation goes back and forth until you gotta wait for one half of it to write down everything they're saying. Good job the girls who met us at the airport brought some more pants for you. Weird how they got all those clothes in your size, though." He glanced at his partner, who was staring fixedly into the distance, clutching his laptop to his chest and hadn't said a word since the girls had waved them off. "Otacon? You alright?"

"Never, _ever_, leave me alone with them again."


	7. Chapter 7

Snake, Otacon and Metal Gear belong to Hideo Kojima, although spiritually they belong to all of us, man. What, they don't? Fine! Then this is only half a chapter that ends abruptly! You'll have to wait for chapter nine to read any more sex! HA!

* * *

Smoke

It was seven in the evening, getting dark and raining heavily when they disembarked in Bristol. Otacon was starting to get a headache from lack of caffeine, and had to stuff the laptop under his jumper as they ran for the bus. Snake fumbled momentarily with the handful of unfamiliar change in the pocket of the jacket the girls had given him, eventually picking out the right money for the fare. The driver pulled away before they sat down, the soldier conscientiously avoiding the front seats reserved for the infirm and elderly and making his way to the middle of the bus.

Otacon looked out of the windows at the orange streetlights and white headlights, smeared by the rain into sweeping blurs. He was thirsty and his temples throbbed, and he let the side of his body press against Snake's as he flipped open his computer and briefly examined the next stage of their travel plan.

"Leave it," said the soldier, quietly. He'd memorised it all on the flight while his partner dozed. Running his thumb over the locker key in his palm, he asked, "You alright?"

Otacon was pretty sure that he meant, are you nervous? To which the answer was nearly always yes, rendering the condition itself unhelpful. He closed the laptop again, wanting to conserve battery. "Feels odd to be here," he admitted.

"Jet lag?"

"Something like that."

The train station the bus took them to was less than a hundred metres away from a MOD laboratory, a large and incongruous construction of glass and bright white concrete that stuck out from the houses crowding it on either side like weapons-developing sore thumb. Snake stared at it for a few seconds, then suburban scenery surrounding it.

"Jesus. What happened here?"

"What do you mean?"

"There's a weapons lab in the middle of town. Some kinda complicity between the locals and the scientists? Are these employees' houses? Don't they know what this building is?"

"No, I, I think it's supposed to be like this." They went into the station, which had been built in a similar fashion and looked more like an airport than the airport had done. "England has a population density of two hundred and forty per square kilometre, that's pretty tightly packed. Things are going to be close together."

They brought tickets from a machine, then had to hurry up the stairs to the platform. The train was already packed with commuters, so they just stood in the vestibule. Snake felt twitchy from being close to so many scientists, but the ride only lasted a few minutes. They got off and shuffled towards the stairs with the rest of the crowd, slowly filtering past the two conductors checking tickets.

The soldier gazed around the small station, made doubly dark by the failing light and the grime-covered skylights. "Bath Spa. Isn't that a tautology?"

"Blame the Romans." Otacon clutched onto his laptop and followed the larger man down the stairs and into the wet, cobbled street. Dodging the chaotic traffic of the car park, they crossed the road to the bus station.

"This is getting bizarre," complained Snake, as he knelt to open the locker. "Is anything in this country more than twenty minutes away?"

"It's just good infrastructure."

He grunted, sliding the heavy sports bag out of its metal box. "Ought to rent a car. I don't like messing about with public transport."

"Why don't we?" Otacon asked.

"I thought you read our brief? The clonettes' contact isn't keen on cars."

"Clo-?" The programmer shook his head. "What the heck is wrong with you, Snake?"

He ignored his partner and stood up, focussed on balancing the angular, heavy weight of his new burden over his shoulder without looking like he was carrying a bag of artillery. "You think their local branch left this for us, or a stooge?"

Otacon started to automatically defend the girls, then frowned. "You checked it over, didn't you?"

"I looked at it. That's not enough to be sure. I need you to make a scanner or something to check for nanomachines and tampering." He reached for his cigarettes, saw the 'no smoking' signs plastered on the walls, and growled at the rainy night.

Standing beside him, Otacon watched Snake's display of shortening temper, not directed at him for once. He thought the ex-government operative was fighting a deep sense of mistrust. Being sent half way around the world on the say-so of a mysterious ally clearly didn't sit easily with him. Otacon sighed, wished he could do something useful, but after the warnings he'd been given, he didn't dare try the wi-fi network. The laptop was starting to get heavy in his arms. He wanted to move closer to Snake, to close his eyes and lean against the larger man – not so much taller, but muscular and strong, like leaning against a warm wall – but he knew he couldn't, not in public. It wasn't even an unspoken rule, just an inhibition of his.

Their bus arrived, and they boarded in silence. When the driver grinned at Snake's accent and his pronunciation of "Corsham", Otacon winced and expected him to explode. Instead, he smiled and got her to repeat the word until he had it right. They sat down, the engineer feeling suddenly, unaccountably jealous.

It was their longest journey yet at thirty minutes, and largely in silence. The road wound out of the city and into an abrupt, short patch of countryside, still dotted with houses, points of light in the rolling hills. He wondered if the tiny hamlets had place names, or if the cities just never stopped, slowly spreading into one another. They passed more ominously incongruous buildings like the MOD laboratory beside the train station, an airfield, an army base, unspecified barbed-wire fenced compounds.

It was too dark to read the street signs, so Otacon was surprised when Snake leaned over and pressed the bell. The bus pulled to a halt at the next stop, and they got off.

"Now what?" Asked Otacon.

"We wait to meet the contact," Snake replied.

"Oh. Well. At least it's stopped raining."

They stood in a pool of orange streetlight by the edge of the road. It was freezing cold. The engineer thought he'd dressed appropriately, but his teeth were starting to chatter. Snake lit up a cigarette, and Otacon couldn't muster the vitriol to lecture him, although he did manage a theatrical cough. Suddenly, the soldier glanced up. A figure was shambling across the wet grass towards them. It was a man wearing baggy, torn clothes, his hair matted into dreadlocks. It didn't take much of an appraising glance for Snake to dismiss the intruder as someone wanting to catch a bus and sink back into his state of relaxed readiness.

So he was completely unprepared when the stranger stuck out his grimy hand and said, "Hi, Philanthropy?"

Snake ground his back teeth together. This was the kind of security breach that would require necks to be snapped. He considered starting with Otacon's when the man stepped forward and shook the proffered hand. "I'm Otacon."

"Ezra," said the unwashed hippie, and wandered back towards the nearest block of flats. "Let's get inside, looks like it might rain again any minute."

They followed him into the building. When they entered the foyer, it was a snapshot of 1970's social architecture, cracked cream tiles and the heat-dipped black plastic handrail peeling from the steel of the banister that curved its angular way up the side of the stairs. When they entered the man's flat, it was like walking into a dingy squat.

It was dark. It smelled of damp and dogs and cigarette smoke. Instead of a doormat, there was a carpet of unopened envelopes. The hall was full of abandoned junk – parts of a broken pushchair, cracked plastic kitchen fittings, an umbrella with its nylon skirt torn and all its ribs exposed. They followed the man past the door to the kitchen, which was hanging off its hinges, and into the living room.

"Take a seat," said Ezra. "I'll put the tea on, then we can get down to business."

The man disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Snake and Otacon looking around for something to sit on. Beneath the window was an aged sofa, its torn cushion-cases long ago covered with a sun-and-moon print blanket. Against the wall was a futon, broken and constantly stuck as a bed. Purple rugs hid the horrors of its mattress, and a miscellany of unmatched pillows was heaped upon it. Everything in the apartment was covered in a thick layer of particulate detritus, but Snake found the thought of sinking into the grubby depths of the sofa particularly unappealing. His expressionlessness tightening, he sat down on the edge of the futon. It creaked.

Otacon, who had spent many years at university, was more comfortable with this environment. Intrigued, he studied his surroundings. There was an unravelling rag rug on the floor, and Tibetan prayer flags wrapped around the curtain pole, while a computer sat on the grimy carpet in the corner of the room. Bookcases, some rickety chipboard, some expensive looking solid wood, all scavenged from skips, lined all the available wall space. They were stuffed with books in various languages. The ones with titles in English were called things like "The Gaia Theory", "The Backpackers Bible", and "Self Sufficiency – Your Key to Surviving the Collapse of Civilisation."

"Do you think this is just a base, or does someone really live here?" He wondered out loud.

"Why don't you ask your new hippie friend?" Growled Snake.

Otacon finally noticed Snake's stony glower of disapproval. "Hey," he murmured, prodding the man's tense shoulder. "What's wrong?"

"What's _wrong?_ This is a _massive_ breach of security-"

The hissed diatribe would have continued, if Ezra hadn't returned with chipped mugs of steaming green liquid, which he distributed to his guests. Snake regarded the tea as if it were toxic, but Otacon accepted gratefully. Ezra sat down on the sofa with his mug in both hands, and said, "So how do you know the collective?"

"The girls? We, uh, we helped them out one time." His throat was dry, and he sipped his tea. "Oh, wow, this is good."

"It's yarrow."

"Oh, yeah? Because I usually drink coffee, so I can't even taste herbal tea, but this is pretty nice."

The man nodded sagely, making his dreadlocks sway. "That's your body trying to accept what's good for it. Most commercial herbal teas are nothing more than dilute squash, but yarrow's very cleansing."

"I can believe that, this smells sorta clean," agreed Otacon.

"I collected it myself. It grows wild all over the place."

"Wow, cool."

Snake was about to scream when the conversation abruptly got back on track.

"But the collective, yeah. After our public gatherings were banned, they turned up at my door one evening. At first I was freaked out about how much they knew, but they've got red hair."

"Red hair? What the hell does that have to do with anything?" Asked Snake, narrowing his eyes.

Ezra gave him a reproving look. "People with red hair are naturally spiritually powerful. Not to mention how much positive energy they're gathering by never speaking."

"They can't speak, they've got no vocal chords."

"Well, that wouldn't stop them from whispering, or using some artificial means. The collective really understands the power of the written word." The man waved a long-nailed hand in a dismissive gesture. "Anyway, the point is that their information was good. It was the proof that we'd been trying to find for years." He turned around and rummaged between the sofa cushions for a sheaf of papers, which he handed to the Americans.

"Project Still," read Otacon. He flipped through the pages, photocopies of schematic diagrams shrunk down to A4 size, lists of manufacturing sites and dates and photographs of shadowy outlines that would only be identified by someone who had seen the machines in all their quasi-cloaked glory. "This is red hot stuff. Why haven't you given it to the authorities?"

"The authorities!" Ezra's eyes widened, and he leaned forward in his seat. "Which authorities? The authorities who made public gatherings for the form of peaceful protest illegal? The authorities who opted out of the European convention of human rights so they could arrest people and hold them for an indefinite length of time, for no given reason?"

Otacon blinked; he thought they'd just left that country. "The press, then."

"The press? You mean the newspapers? They're owned by multinational conglomerates, who decide what to print based on how many papers it'll sell." He didn't sound angry, only grim. "Even if someone decided it was a newsworthy story, nobody who read it would believe it. Only an idiot believes what the mass media tells them."

The engineer gulped, remembering a time when he had been that idiot. "Well... What about your organisation? There must be more than just you working on this."

Ezra raised his eyebrows and pressed a finger to his lips. "Being head of an organisation carries a heavy sentence these days. We're nothing more than a collection of like-minded individuals. The others will be here soon."

Snake sat in silence throughout the exchange. He could understand the tone of Ezra's speech, could recognise the feeling that froze your guts when you realised that every small, seemingly unconnected move your enemy had made up until this point was simply to cut off your escape when they pulled away the curtain and revealed their master plan.

"Wait," said Snake, abruptly. "The.. the collective said the new Metal Gear isn't a government project, but funded by disgruntled businessmen. I can see why they'd get sick of this regime, but has government policy designed to gag the citizens backfired, or what? What the hell is going on here?"

"Of course it's not a government project," replied Ezra, looking blank. "The Ministry of Defence isn't connected to the government. They make their own decisions about what to research. Politicians come to them for advice, not the other way around. I mean," the man laughed, "You can't have someone who's only qualification is that they've been elected deciding military policy."

The soldier gave a disgusted growl, and would have interrogated Ezra on his democratic double standards, when there was a knock at the door. He tensed, hand dropping to the gun under his sweater. Behind him, he could hear Otacon's startled intake of breath, feel him shift his weight to get behind cover.

Unperturbed by the reaction of his guests, Ezra got up and shambled to the door. It was his associates. A young woman with long, dark pink hair and a tall man with a beard walked into the living room, followed by a big black mongrel dog. The dog was thin and shaggy, and snuffled at the carpet for crumbs while the two humans sat down and introduced themselves.

"I'm George," said the man, nodding to Otacon but largely addressing Snake. "I'm going to be your support on this mission. Computers and radios are as good as useless here, they're monitoring everything, so the more low-tech the better. You'll be going in with a paper map and a stack of photographs."

"And I'm Kate," said the woman with the pink hair. "I'm mostly here because women are never revolutionary terrorists. It's a really effective smokescreen," she said brightly. "If we ever need a little extra cover, I bring my daughter along."

"Wow." Managing to be completely oblivious to the slow tightening of Snake's jaw, Otacon leaned forward so the dog could sniff his hands. "I guess that would work. How old is she?"

"Eight months."

Ezra brought more tea, and said he'd start cooking.

"We'd better get down to it, then," said George. He took the notes on Project Still, flicked through them until he found a map of the compound. "There's a camera blind spot here, and they don't make patrols of the outer perimeter, so this'll be our infiltration point. We've been cutting the barbed wire on top of the fence, so you'll be able to get through. After that, it's just a matter of avoiding the guards and the cameras. They've got dogs, too." He glanced up at the mercenary. "Think you can do it?"

Snake gave an affirmative grunt. "And what'll you be doing while I stroll through the most heavily guarded military base in England?"

"It's not a military base," the man corrected him. "It's an MoD base. And I won't be doing anything except waiting for you. Sorry, man. If we could do it ourselves, it'd already have been done."

"What about me?" Asked Otacon, without looking up from scratching the ears of the unkempt black mongrel.

"Sorry, man," repeated George. "Any technology more complex than a mechanical pencil can be seized and searched without a warrant. If you can help him without using a computer, mobile phone or radio, go ahead."

"Hmm." The engineer kept his head down, stroking the animal's rough coat and thinking. "How far away is the base from the town?"

"It's not, it's surrounded by houses."

"Then there must be a constant jumble of civilian communication signals. If I could keep the output low and hide amongst the background noise-"

"It's too big a risk." Kate glanced at Snake, then back to Otacon. "It's your arse on the line, so it's up to you. But if I were you, I'd sit this one out. You're only going to be putting the mission in danger."

He looked up at his partner. Snake found the man's expression hard to read, something that had nothing to do with his glasses and everything to do with his own feelings on the matter. "I think you should stay here," he said, eventually. "Work on re-encrypting the stuff on your laptop. We've still got to get out of this country again."

Ezra walked in. "Food's ready," he informed the assembled crowd. It was brown rice, and lentils cooked with tomato paste. Otacon ate as if he were starving. The last real food he'd had was the hoi sin mink rolls, and they were a long time ago. More herbal tea was served, although Snake's request for plain water was fulfilled. The battle-hardened mercenary, who would readily devour a ten-year-old MRE, was suddenly struck with the repellent certainty that the bowls they were eating from had only been rinsed out with cold water since their last use.

After the meal, he tightened his sneaking suit and readied his weapons while George went over the maps with him. It wasn't a complicated mission, apart from the swarms of guards. There was nothing to get worried about. There was no reason to get annoyed that Otacon seemed too caught up in conversation with his new friends to do any more than wave and say, "good luck."

As they walked out, the freshness of the countryside night air hit him, and he took a few deep breath to clear his head of dirty hippie hovels. So the clone-girls had some disgusting allies. What else could you expect from a bunch of subhuman ferret-wranglers. Time to get his head in the game. "Let's go, where's your car?"

George just gave him a blank look.

They left the concrete yard, criss-crossed with washing lines, and walked down the street. There was an A-road, screened with hedges. Past that was the perimeter fence of the base.

Snake glared at it. "You spent years setting this up, right? How did you get a base of operations two hundred metres away from a secret weapons lab?"

"Nothing's set up, man. That's just where the Council houses are. I only live here 'cause I used to have a really bad heroin problem."

The mercenary just stared at him for a long moment.

"Don't worry man, I've been clean for years," amended George, hurriedly. "Ever since this dealer broke my legs. You wanna get over the fence now, or what?"

Despite the unshakable feeling that this was only going to end badly, Snake climbed the chain-link fence. His mission support pointed out where they'd surreptitiously cut the rusty barbed wire, and he got through with only a few minor scratches. He dropped noiselessly to the ground and turned back to George, who was lying in the ditch by the side of the road and covering himself in newspapers.

"Hey, what the hell are you doing?" Growled Snake. "What if someone drives past and sees you?"

"They'll assume I'm drunk."

"Yeah, and what if they stop?"

George gave a muffled snort of laughter. "I'm your cover. If the guards suspect anything, I'll throw stuff at the fence."

"What kind of a plan is that? They'll know something is going on!"

"Nah, I'm here, like, three nights a week."

Cursing all drug-addled drains upon society, Snake drew his M9 and moved towards the base.


	8. Chapter 8

Hullo, chaps! Have an update. It's only been sitting half-finished on my computer for three months. I'm so sorry, PirateShotgun! Thank you for keeping the faith! Huge thanks to all who left reviews. I LIVE FOR MY READERS.

It's a short one, but there are graphic, explicit mentions of hippies. Oh, and also some sex.

Hopefully, not so much will keep me from writing the next chapter!

Otacon, Solid Snake and Metal Gear belong to Hideo Kojima.

* * *

Otacon had expected the group to break up once Snake had gone, but instead Ezra had put some music on and it was turning into a party. He sat on the broken futon with the dog sprawled across his lap, trying to remember how to make polite conversation.

Kate leaned towards him, strands of her dirty pink hair sliding over her shoulders. "You used to design weapons, didn't you?"

"I still do, if you count the guns I modify for Snake."

"No, not like that." She waved her hands around her head, indicating something large. "You know. Big weapons."

He shook his head. "Just Rex," he said lightly, running his fingers through the dog's musty fur.

"I didn't think so," she said, sounding strangely satisfied. "You don't have a destructive aura."

"I don't?"

"You can't just tell that sort of thing about a person," said Ezra, sternly.

"But you trusted the girls. The collective, I mean."

"Oh, yeah." He swept his hand in a dismissive arc. "And I trust you. But you can't just tell that sort of thing from glancing at someone's aura."

Kate shook her head, seeming to be warming up to an old argument. She rolled a cigarette as she spoke. Otacon wasn't naive enough to think that tobacco came in transparent plastic bags. "Look, if people emit spiritual energy-"

"Which they do-"

"And that spiritual energy alters its texture and frequency based on their personality, why shouldn't the feel of their aura be sufficient criteria upon which to trust them?"

"Um," said the engineer. "Auras?"

"Yes." The woman nodded. "The physical projection of your spirit on the fabric of space."

Look," said Ezra, taking out a notebook and a pencil. Kate rolled her eyes, sat back and lit her cigarette. It didn't seem to catch properly, and she had to keep flicking the plastic lighter on. The man proceeded to sketch out a triangle, the highest point of which reached towards the top of the paper. "This represents male energy. It's possessive and wants to influence the physical world around it." He drew another triangle, this one facing downwards, their points intersecting, and some circles and swirls around them. "This represents female energy. It's creative and accepting."

Otacon blinked at the summary, and the acrid, sweat-smelling smoke. "How can you be creative without wanting to influence the physical world?"

"A good question," replied Kate, who handed the cigarette and the lighter to her comrade. "Even IF this model isn't based on conventional sexuality," she said, emphasising the IF heavily enough to make the physicist think this was a well-worn argument indeed, "Even then, I think it's too bound to our own view of the world. Why should the reverberating life energy of the universe be gendered, when gender isn't essential to lifeforms?"

"It's not about biology, it's about the way forces oppose one another." Ezra offered Otacon the cigarette, but he shook his head. "You sure?"

"Snake would go mad," he said. "And, y'know, it's bad for you."

"It's three hundred times less likely than tobacco to give you cancer," he said, passing the cigarette to Kate.

Otacon strongly doubted the accuracy of those statistics, but got the broad point. "If it's any consolation, I've been trying to get him to quit smoking since we first met."

"Hmm," said Kate. "I bet he drinks alcohol, too. I bet he's got a serious addictive personality."

Ezra gave an impatient noise, but the programmer looked thoughtful. "What do you mean?"

"Like, everything he does, he can't stop. If there's alcohol in the house, he thinks about it until he drinks it. And he's got to be the best at everything he does." She took a long drag on the rolled cigarette, then gave it to Ezra; her voice was beginning to slur lazily. "I bet he does a hundred press-ups a day."

"Two hundred," said Otacon, dreamily.

"Of course he does!" said the man, over the click of the lighter. "Of course he does press-ups, he's the hardest bastard in the world."

"But," said Kate. "Does he do press-ups because he's the hardest bastard in the world? Or is he the hardest bastard in the world because he has an addictive personality that makes him do press-ups?"

Everybody gave a slow, wondering "Oooh."

A few moments passed in silence as Ezra rolled another cigarette.

Kate sank back on the sofa, which pulled her assortment of t-shirts up and exposed her pierced navel. Dreamily, she asked, "What's he like in bed?"

"Gentle," said Otacon, stroking the dozing dog's ears.

"Really?"

"Really. It's like, he's so strong that he can be really... really gentle."

In the back of his mind, Otacon knew very clearly that a few lungfuls of second-hand pot weren't enough to make him this candid. He couldn't remember, though, the last time he'd had a conversation about nothing in particular with people he didn't spend all day with. Maybe back in Shadow Moses, with somebody who was dead now.

"I bet he'd be rough with a woman," Kate said, sounding almost wistful. "Bite your tits like a wild animal. Bang you into the headboard."

Otacon laughed at the mental image, while the two half-stoned philosophers began to argue about whether that proved Ezra was right or not.

* * *

No soliton radar, no codec, no problem.

This was one of the strangest places Snake had ever infiltrated. There were security cameras everywhere, as if they were designed to be seen. Soldiers with rifles made regular, easily avoided patrols. Scientists and technicians swarmed everywhere, regardless of the late hour, but seemed so accustomed to keeping their eyes on their own work that they noticed little else.

It was almost routine. Already well camouflaged in his travel-stained sneaking suit, he effortlessly slid around the patches of 12-watt fluorescent floodlight. It was as if the security presence was largely for show. He reminded himself that he was in a country of compulsive queue formers, whose idea of aggressive civil action was to stand outside in a sheepish group.

The compound was large, and he was making a methodical sweep. No dead-black walking tanks had shown up yet. According to the map George had given him, he was still in the ballistics research section, and his best bet was probably the wide, open space on the other side of the base, marked 'overflow car parking'.

Snake strolled past the staff canteen. If any of the men and women on the late shift noticed him, they gave little sign of it. Perhaps people dressed like a bulky ninja wandered around here on a nightly basis, or they were more accustomed to their security threats stopping every ten minutes to roll a cigarette.

The overflow car park was filled with dark shapes that made his skin crawl with recognition. They hadn't bothered with the netting camouflage here – the machines were simply crouched down, looking like nothing in particular, unless you knew what they were.

They were smaller than the ones he'd seen before, and there were a lot of them. Snake tried to think. The UK was a tiny, well-armed country, and could slam its borders shut in a way that China never could. Even if destroying this many was a possibility, he'd never get back to the USA. This might be nothing more than a fraction of the full strike force. The enormity of the task hit him.

He wondered if the clone-girls had known.

He decided to blame them on principle.

Caught in an endless loop of examining hopeless possibilities, he made his way back to the fence and hopped over it. Without waiting for George to pick up his sheets of newspaper, he wandered despondently back to the council building. Time for a serious talk with Otacon. He'd know what to do in this situation – he'd have seen something like it in a cartoon show, or know a specialist in Japan, or...

Before he even reached the flat, the sound of laughter reached him. It was raucous and carefree, and grated violently on his nerves. The front door slammed open, harder than he'd intended, and he stormed inside. Otacon, his Otacon, was lying on the filthy carpet with these dirty hippies, laughing like an idiot, and Snake could smell the harsh sweat-stink of cannabis smoke.

Something inside the mercenary snapped. He strode forward, took the man by the scruff of the neck, yanked him to his feet and dragged him into the bathroom. Pressing him against the wall, pinning him there with a forearm across his chest, Snake pushed his face into Otacon's and snarled, "You're no fucking use to me without your brain."

For a split-second, Otacon stood there, his breathing rapid, his eyes wide with shock and fear. Then a look of fury crossed his face. He shoved Snake away and threw a wild, uncoordinated, and above all _hard_ punch at him, connecting with a resounding smack on his left cheekbone. "Don't you _ever_," growled the smaller man, grabbing Snake's shoulders and kissing him forcefully, shoving his tongue into the man's mouth.

Not remembering when he'd gotten so hard, Snake slammed his lover against the wall and pawed at the unfamiliar zip on his loose jeans without disengaging from the kiss. He could feel Otacon's hands on him, fighting with the clasps and fastenings on the sneaking suit. Batting them away impatiently, he opened the fly and manoeuvred his erect cock out, biting at the man's neck all the while.

Otacon squeezed his eyes shut as fingers worked into him, slick with god-knew-what, but more forcefully than he was used to. Snake reached down, and got one arm under the smaller man's arse. Effortlessly, he picked him up, and the brutal strength of those powerful arms made the engineer almost as hot as the fingers inside him. He could feel the man shifting their positions, then grinding savagely into him. There was a brief, intense spike of pain, and Otacon cried out. Then his legs were wrapped around the man's waist, leaning back against the bathroom wall and slamming into him hard, tugging erraticly at his own erection until he came.

Leaning forward, Snake panted raggedly into Otacon's neck, pressing his forehead against the damp plasterboard. He shifted his grip, and Otacon relaxed, sliding his legs down to touch the floor with a sigh.

"Well?" He said.

Snake glanced up, momentarily lost, before he remembered what sparked the tensions that led them here. Gently, he kissed Otacon again. The taste of smoke was notably absent. "...Sorry. Guess I was wrong."

The hacker gave a little huff of laughter, and leaned against Snake's muscular chest. "I wouldn't do that to you. Don't ever think I would."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry for hitting you."

It was the soldier's turn to grin. "Don't worry about it." He took a step back, and winced as he tugged off the used condom. Otacon stared, unable to recall him putting it on.

"Where the heck did that come from?"

"Never leave home without 'em," said Snake, smugly, rearranging his clothes.

"We're in someone's bathroom!" Hissed Otacon. He picked his trousers up, and giggled. "I can't believe we did that."

"Well, if you hadn't been having a love-in with your hippie friends..."

"Well, if you hadn't dragged me in here!" He laughed again, then sobered. "I guess that means it didn't go well?"

The mercenary grimaced and left the bathroom, motioning for his partner to follow.

In a display of total bravado or complete social ineptitude, Snake marched into the living room and launched into an overview of the situation for the people who'd just heard him having violent sex with his partner in the next room. "It's looking bad," he announced. "There's enough military hardware to win World War Three sitting just down the street from you, and no way I can take them all out individually. If we make a wrong move, the UK will be locked down tighter than Alcatraz on a bad day, and I'm sure as hell not spending the rest of my life in a country where socialists, liberals and drug addicts roam the streets unhindered." Otacon buried his face in his hands, but Snake continued regardless. "Even if a direct confrontation is ruled out, we have to stop those things before they're used. This has gone so far beyond readdressing the balance of power, it's insane. The only thing it explains is why they're phasing out the Harrier without there seeming to be a viable replacement for the VTOL/STOL role."

"You're right!" Ezra jumped up and banged his fist into his palm. "I love Harriers! We have to put an end to this madness!"

Snake turned to interrogate the angry pacifist, but Otacon cleared his throat. "I had an idea, actually," he said, sitting on the sofa and reaching for his laptop. "But I'm going to need a better computer."


End file.
